Cacti was one of the top open-source monitoring software packages in the market several years back and is still used in various companies throughout the world. Whether your using Cacti now or are looking for a comparable software package, we'll go over some of the Best Cacti Alternatives on the Market as of 2019!
We'll be comparing not only features of cacti with popular alternatives, but the user interface that is so easy to use.
Some features we'll be looking for in an alternative are as follows:
- Comparable Graphing Functionality
- Built-in SNMP Support & Monitoring
- Built-in Templates for Graphs and reports
- User Management for Different User Types and Administration
- Automated Network Auto-discovery of Network Nodes
- Log Viewer
- Netflow Support
- Downtime Alerts and Reports
- Real-time Reports/Graphs w/ 5 second intervals
The features from above are what comes natively with Cacti via either their default installation or through a Plug-in that is officially supported by Cacti.
We'll include all software that has the ability to complete at least the tasks listed above and more.
Here's the Top Alternatives to Cacti of 2020:
1. Solarwinds NPM
Solarwinds offers one of the best network performance monitoring and bandwidth monitoring tools on the Market – Network Performance Monitor.
It has features like Netflow Analyzer, Bandwidth Monitoring, Network Inventory Management, IPAM and much more.
It not only has support for SNMP, but ICMP/Ping, WMI, Netflow, Sflow, Jflow, IPFIX and much more. It comes with pre-built templates, reports, graphs and alerts to help you get monitoring within minutes instead of days.
Solarwinds is the Industry standard when it comes to Network monitoring and management and their ever growing offerings and rock solid support is always there around the clock if you need assistance with any of their Software packages.
They've recently released features with NPM that really make it stand out from the crowd, in particularly their Network Insights for Cisco ASA and NetPath capabilities.
NetPath is a visualize analysis of each hop or network device your traffic is traveling through and it identifies points of congestion and latency to help you troubleshoot quickly and efficiently without having to dig to far for the issue.
Official Website:
https://www.solarwinds.com/network-performance-monitor
Download Free 30 Days:
http://www.solarwinds.com/register/registrationb.aspx?program=607&c=70150000000Dlbw
2. PRTG
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is another Great option for a Cacti Replacement, as they provide all of the features we've listed above and much more. PRTG has a proven track record of on-premise monitoring and have recently released their Cloud monitoring solution as well if this is something that you would like to explore.
PRTG offers up to 100 Sensors FREE if you would to test it out in your network and supports many of the same features that Solarwinds does, including Flexible Alerts and reporting systems, Mobile Apps for iPhone, Ipad and Android devices, Network Maps and much more!
PRTG has hundreds of pre-packaged sensors that you can use to quickly setup and monitor, graph and create reports about quickly within their interface, including Bandwidth Monitors, Web Service Monitors, WMI, Linux, Virtual Server Monitors and many more.
You can see a full List of their Available Sensors here: https://www.paessler.com/manuals/prtg/available_sensor_types
Official Website:
https://www.paessler.com/prtg/
Download 100 Free Sensors:
https://www.paessler.com/prtg/download
3. WhatsUp Gold
WhatsUp Gold 2017 by Ipswitch has made great strides in the Network Monitoring, Graphing and Reporting realm with their latest offering of WhatsUp GOLD.
New features include Real-time Monitoring, monitor Cloud services including AWS, Azure and many more, Network Auto-discovery features and topology mapping.
Their dashboard also provides great visibility into critical services, servers and computers within your network, allowing your to view Alerts and Uptime availabitity and percentage of uptime throughout their lifespan. Hardware performance, faults, utilization, failures and bottlenecks can be selected within the Alert Center Dashboard as seen below.
Official Website:
https://www.ipswitch.com/application-and-network-monitoring/whatsup-gold
Download Trial:
https://www.ipswitch.com/forms/free-trials/whatsup-gold
ManageEngine OpManager
OpManager is ManageEngine's answer to Network Monitoring and management solutions. They are well priced for the feature sets they provide and have extensive support for all of the Cacti features we are looking to replace.
Opmanager is another Great Cacti Alternative if your looking for a visually attractive replacement.
Boasting not only the typical Networking, bandwidth and IP monitoring features that many of the other solutions here have as well, but Configuration Management, Switch port management, wireless monitoring and much more.
Official Website:
https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/
Download:
https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/download.html
Nagios
Nagios is an Open-source replacement is known as one of the longest standing Network management and monitoring solutions out there. It has many features that Cacti has and add-on's and plugins that give it the flexibility and features that you may be looking for.
Nagios is not as straight forward as some of the other software packages from above, but it works nonetheless.
Nagios has an abundance of plugins that will help you complete many of the same tasks that we're looking for – but we must warn you that you'll have to get your hands dirty with the configuration files and tasks included with installing and maintaining Nagios, as its not nearly as point and click as many think.
Official Website:
Download:
https://www.nagios.org/downloads/
Conclusion
The above Network Monitoring and magenament solutions are great alternatives for Cacti and plotting out graphs of your network infrastructure! We've gone through each of these software packages and are confident that you will find them to be very similar to Cacti.
We suggest you download a few packages from above and get them configured in a lab/testing environment before actually implementing them into your Production environment. You'll quickly figure out which one suits your needs over the others!
