Performance Monitoring: Ganglia vs Graphite

Question

I was looking for a high performance monitoring solution for our production servers and I've come across a number of free tools and paid services. I would like to avoid paid services unless absolutely necessary and of the free tools the two that stood out were Ganglia and Graphite.

However, I found no comparisons between the two and I'd like to know if anyone has any insight on this.

What are the pros and cons of using Ganglia vs. Graphite and vice-versa?

Answer 1

We use them both where I work, and they are both fine tools. Our Graphite is on the current version, but our Ganglia is not, so take this info with a grain of salt.

In my experience, where Graphite really shines is in the presentation of the data you give it. With Ganglia you have to edit a .php file and deploy it to your Ganglia web server for each new summary graph you want to view. This does not encourage rapid exploration and discovery. All of the graphs you create this way are displayed simultaneously; there is no option to view a subset of your summary graphs.

With Graphite, there is a nice UI that allows you to interactively construct a view on the specific info you are interested in. It's simple to merge separate graphs, computing averages, totals, etc. You can save different dashboards (collections of graphs) to show specific sets of data, and make your dashboards available to other users.

Hope this helps....