[vr] wrote:
I would probably use Nagios due to being able to monitor specific services. I have the Cacti monitor plugin installed but none of my hosts have it checked "on" yet they still fire off an email when the host goes up or down.
Thold (which sends the emails) and Monitor are 2 separate plugins. Unchecking the "monitor host" checkbox just stops it from being displayed on the Monitor tab, and from sending an alert about that server. If you don't want a host down email at all, then uncheck the setting for it in Settings.
As far as the original question. Both apps are good at what they do, but they do things differently and focus on different areas. Nagios is good at monitoring and alerting, Cacti is good monitoring and graphing. Cacti can do alerting using the thold plugin, but its not anywhere near (yet, I'm working on it) as Nagios on that front. Nagios is not easy to configure for a novice (flat config file), Cacti has a web UI, but some of the really advanced stuff takes some time to learn.
