What is Cacti?

Cacti is a complete front-end to RRDTool ((Round Robin Database tool is a system to store and display time-series data.), it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database.
The front-end is completely PHP driven.
Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handle’s the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.

Data Sources
To handle data gathering, you can feed cacti the paths to any external script/command along with any data that the user will need to "fill in", cacti will then gather this data in a cron-job and populate a MySQL database/the round robin archives.

Data Sources can also be created, which correspond to actual data on the graph. For instance, if a user would want to graph the ping times to a host, you could create a data source utilizing a script that pings a host and returns it's value in milliseconds. After defining options for RRDTool such as how to store the data you will be able to define any additional information that the data input source requires, such as a host to ping in this case. Once a data source is created, it is automatically maintained at 5 minute intervals.

Graphs
Once one or more data sources are defined, an RRDTool graph can be created using the data. Cacti allows you to create almost any imaginable RRDTool graph using all of the standard RRDTool graph types and consolidation functions. A color selection area and automatic text padding function also aid in the creation of graphs to make the process easier.

Not only can you create RRDTool based graphs in cacti, but there are many ways to display them. Along with a standard "list view" and a "preview mode", which resembles the RRDTool frontend 14all, there is a "tree view", which allows you to put graphs onto a hierarchical tree for organizational purposes.

User Management
Due to the many functions of cacti, a user based management tool is built in so you can add users and give them rights to certain areas of cacti. This would allow someone to create some users that can change graph parameters, while others can only view graphs. Each user also maintains their own settings when it comes to viewing graphs.

Templating
Lastly, cacti is able to scale to a large number of data sources and graphs through the use of templates. This allows the creation of a single graph or data source template which defines any graph or data source associated with it. Host templates enable you to define the capabilities of a host so cacti can poll it for information upon the addition of a new host.

Support

Linux, Windows

Licensing/Donations

Cacti is released under the GNU General Public License, meaning that it is completely free with no strings attached. However, if you enjoy Cacti and find it useful be sure to check out my donations page for various ways to encourage development and otherwise make me happy.

Website

http://cacti.net

Opennms

OpenNMS is the world's first enterprise grade network management platform developed under the open source model. It consists of a community supported open-source project as well as a commercial services, training, and support organization.

Website
http://www.opennms.com/site/

Licence

GPL

Munin

Munin the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine "what's different today" when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you're doing capacity-wise on any resources.
Support:- Linux/Windows

Website

http://munin.projects.linpro.no

Big Sister

The Big Sister network monitor is a real time system and network health monitoring application.

Functions
•   monitor networked systems
•   provide a simple real-time view of the current network status
•   notify you when your systems are becoming critical
•   generate a history of status changes
•   log and display a variety of system performance data

Licence

GNU General Public License

Website

http://www.bigsister.ch/snapshots.html

Zenoss
Zenoss provides a complete suite of software and services to help you succeed monitoring your IT infrastructure.

Screenshots:- http://www.zenoss.com/product/screenshots

Licence
GPL

Support
Linux

Website
http://www.zenoss.com/product/

Big brother

Big Brother is a combination of monitoring methods. Unlike SNMP where information is just collected and devices polled, Big Brother is designed in such a way that each local system broadcasts its own information to a central location. Simultaneously, Big Brother also polls all networked systems from a central location. This creates a highly efficient and redundant method for proactive network monitoring.

Features

Display

Big Brother displays status information as web pages or WML pages for WAP-enabled devices. These web pages have the systems monitored down the left hand side of the page, the tests for each system across the top of the page. This results in a matrix of color coded dots on screen. Green is Good, Red is Bad. In addition, the background color of the status pages is always the color of the most serious condition of any element being monitored at that time.
Architecture

Big Brother uses a client-server architecture combined with methods which both push and pull data. Network testing is done by polling all monitored services from a single machine, and reporting these results to a central location (the BBDISPLAY). If you want local system information, you can install a BB client on the local machine, which will send CPU, process, disk space, and logfile status reports in periodically. Each report is timestamped with an expiration date (like milk). This lets us know when a report is no longer valid, which is usually an indication of a more serious problem.
Redundancy

It's not much good if your monitoring system can fail and not tell you of the problem. Big Brother supports redundancy through allowing you to run multiple instances of Big Brother in parallel. This means that BB clients can report into multiple Web Displays (BBDISPLAYs) and Notification servers (BBPAGERs).
Protocol

Big Brother sends all status reports from client to server over port 1984. What other port would Big Brother use? The IANA has assigned Big Brother this port, and the BB protocol itself is open. Limited support for SNMP trap handling is supported using third-party plugins.
Platforms

The Big Brother servers and BBNET functions run on Unix/Linux, with a scaled-down version for NT/Win2K is also available. Client software is available for Unix/Linux, NT/Win2K/Win2003 while user contributed clients for Netware, Mac OS 9, VMS, AS/400 and VM/ESA at http://www.deadcat.net.
Network tests

Big Brother includes support for testing ftp, http, https, smtp, pop3, dns, telnet, imap, nntp, and ssh servers. Support for additional tests is easily added.
Local Tests

If you choose to install a BB client on a local machine, it will monitor disk space, CPU usage, messages, and can check that important processes are up and running.
Notification

Big Brother has a sophisticated notification ruleset, not for the faint of heart (blame Rob). You can notify based on time-of-day, machine, or the test that failed. In addition we support an initial delay before paging (useful to cut down on late night false alarms), page-only-every defined amount of time, paging groups, acknowledgement, and escalation. Built in support for e-mail paging, alphanumeric paging via Qpage or Sendpage, or numeric and SMS pages via Kermit for the BB Unix/Linux server platform while the NT/Win2K server platform only supports e-mail for now. Under the Unix/Linux server platform, you can even create your own custom notification procedure.
History & Reporting

Big Brother supports reporting, which will allow you to determine whether Service Level Agreements are being met. In addition, we provide access to historical status information so you can see what the problem was at any given time.
Plug-ins & Extensions

Big Brother supports plug-ins. You can write plug-ins in any language, and we include several samples to make it easy. In addition, Brothers from around the world have written hundreds of plug-ins to monitor everything from Oracle Databases to CPU temperature on Solaris machines. You can see the current list at http://www.deadcat.net.
Flexibility

Big Brother is very flexible. Warning and alarm levels are all easily redefinable. The Web Display can be easily customized. We have hooks into other products, like MRTG for bandwidth monitoring. Since you have the source code, you can easily figure out what Big Brother is doing, and change it to suit your needs.
Community

One of the best things about Big Brother is the community that has sprung up around it. Over 2000 Brothers on the various mailing list provide quick and friendly support and commentary.

Licence
Big Brother is distributed under our Better than Free license. Clause 2 from that license determines whether you need to buy a Commercial license.

Website

http://www.bb4.org