bwmon vs Cacti

bwmon is a free, self-hosted bandwidth monitor for one Linux host and one network interface. Its dashboard updates receive and transmit rates every second, charts recent traffic, and lists top processes. When traffic passes five times its rolling two-minute average, bwmon records process attribution, all-interface rates, and leading conntrack flows for spike investigation. It retains five-minute samples for six months, with views from one hour to all time, a time-of-week heatmap, and a rate histogram. A banner appears when the rolling five-minute average reaches 40 Mbps; cleared alerts remain in the history table. Installation uses a shell script that sets up the collector, systemd service, cron jobs, and nginx server block; the dashboard defaults to port 8080. It requires Linux kernel 4.0 or later and root access. Debian and Ubuntu use the apt-based installer, while other distributions need manual dependency setup. The project recommends authentication for internet-exposed installations.

Cacti is a free, self-hosted network graphing and operational monitoring framework built around RRDtool. It collects data through SNMP object identifiers or scripts, which can retrieve database information or run other code. Availability checks cover SNMP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP. Discovery and automation can create graphs and data sources, while Remote Data Collectors distribute collection and cache data during network interruptions. Graph items support line, area, stacked, horizontal-rule, vertical-rule, print, and comment types. Device templates connect devices with graph templates and data queries, and plugins can extend collection to other protocols, with WMI listed as an example. Role-based management covers users, groups, and domains. Cacti supports SNMP versions 1, 2, and 3, with a documented limitation for advanced SNMPv3 settings such as SHA224+ or AES192+ when PHP SNMP is used. It is available for Linux/Unix and Windows. Installation requires MySQL, PHP, RRDtool, Net-SNMP, and a PHP-capable web server such as Apache or IIS.