Alternatives to Cacti
RRDtool-based graphing and monitoring for network devices. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Cacti
RRDtool-based graphing and monitoring for network devices.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Cacti.
LibreNMS
Discover and monitor network equipment from a central server.
LibreNMS discovers and monitors network equipment from a central server with built-in alerting and historical graphs, under GPL-3.0, so alerting does not require plugins.
Observium
Autodiscovering network monitoring platform with a clean interface.
Observium autodiscovers devices with graphs and inventory in a cleaner interface, but it is not open source and alerting sits in the paid subscription edition.
Zabbix
Enterprise-scale open-source monitoring for networks and applications.
Zabbix is AGPL-3.0 monitoring that scales to tens of thousands of devices with proxies and a large template library, at the cost of extensive configuration.
PRTG Network Monitor
Sensor-based network monitoring, free for the first 100 sensors.
PRTG offers autodiscovery, maps and alerting in one interface with 100 free sensors, but it is closed source, Windows-server only and priced per sensor.
NetXMS
Monitor network devices, servers and infrastructure through a central platform.
NetXMS monitors network devices, servers and infrastructure from a central platform with management interfaces, under freemium terms for enterprise editions.
OpenNMS
Carrier-grade open-source network monitoring platform with event correlation.
OpenNMS is a carrier-grade platform with event correlation and Grafana integration, but its complexity may be overkill for small networks and support needs paid tiers.
Checkmk
Hybrid open-source and commercial monitoring with agent-based and SNMP auto-discovery.
Checkmk adds agent-based and SNMP auto-discovery for hosts and services, while advanced features and scaling are gated behind paid commercial editions.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
Industry-standard self-hosted network performance monitor with intelligent maps.
SolarWinds NPM adds NetPath and intelligent network maps for enterprise IT, but is commercial, closed source and needs dedicated infrastructure.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Cacti as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Monitorix
Lightweight self-hosted tool that graphs Linux and BSD server resources and services in a browser.
Cacti uses RRDtool graphs under GPL-2.0 like Monitorix but is aimed at network devices through templates, with alerting only via plugins.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
SmokePing
Latency measurement and visualisation over time.
Grafana
Dashboard and visualization front end for metrics, logs and traces.
Prometheus
Metrics database that scrapes targets and evaluates alerting rules.
Nagios Core
Monitor hosts and services with a configurable alerting engine.
Telegraf
Collect and forward metrics using a configurable server agent.
