My Linux

Recently, I have setup an observium server for our office. After about two weeks of operation, here's what I think of them- Observium Pros: Has thousands of templates. Auto discovers which templates are applicable for a host Comparatively better interface Cons: Comparatively more processor intensive. Does not work without DNS (/etc/hosts tuning is helpful) Adding users and controlling view can be tricky The bandwidth graph of cacti is better I could not find any "zoom" feature for the graphs Cacti Pros: Very good for bandwidth graphs. Very good for user portals and controlling user views. Easily customizable graph trees Cons: No auto discovery feature Adding new templates can be tricky, very tricky. Needs 64 bit counters for bandwidth graphs over 100 Mbps. Learnt it the hard way.

I have deployed observium in an Ubuntu (12.04) today. I have stumbled upon observium while searching for Network Monitoring software, and the demo seemed pretty impressive. The installation was not very hard, and observium has been running quite smoothly. Below, I give my opinion - Both observium and cacti have similar graph. But observium gives cool previews when the cursor is placed over the graph. observium has tool for real time graph ( with update interval as low as 1 sec O_O ) whereas cacti graphs are updated every 5 minutes. observium is an auto-discovery program, whereas in cacti, every graph has to be manually added. By auto-discovery, I mean that whenever a device is added, all possible graphs are automatically generated. Both observium and cacti provide a lot of customization for user access. Still, I think I will be continuing using cacti. The main reason behind this decision is- observium can not work without proper DNS. Actually, auto-discovery protocol states t...