Administratoring (new word?) several Cacti servers monitoring thousands
of devices I would just say Cacti is pretty awesome. It's not flawless
but with its plugin support people have extended its functionality quite
a bit more. It could be made to identify various types of traffic based
on application but it would also depend on how it gets its data in the
first place. It is not really designed for that as much. Something like
the OP's request I think would be better served with an ntop or similar
app, especially as ntop apparently also supports sflow/netflow which
would be even more ideal assuming your routers support sflow/netflow
exporting. Netflow Analyzer works well but would be spendy if you're
just looking to troubleshoot some problems when they occur.

That being said I highly recommend running Cacti (or similar) for
general use on any network you deem important.

Few examples of Cacti plugins I've found useful and cool are Weathermap,
Realtime Graph Viewer, Thresholds, Aggregate Graph Maker.... I am sure
there are more but those come to mind quickly.

On Thu, 2011-11-17 at 09:48 -0600, Robert Nesius wrote:

> I have not installed nor administered either service.  I have hit
> cricket web pages to profile some behaviors - but the network admin
> team had put that in place.  I think Robert's right - cricket will get
> you slightly closer to the raw firehose, but it may be that switches
> can report all of the meta-data you care about for traffic analysis
> via SNMP, making cacti a good (better?) way to go.   
> 
> Thanks to the question below I'm wanting to carve some time out and
> play with both and compare. :) 
> 
> -Rob
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Robert Radtke <robert at hutman.net>
> wrote:
> 
>         I didn't look that closely - but it appears that cricket does
>         packet capture and creates graphs based on that. Cacti
>         collects data from via SNMP and other sources but doesn't
>         really inspect packets on your network. 
>         
>         
>         
>         
>                 
>                 
>                 
>                 
>                 Is there anything Cricket can do that Cacti can't? It
>                 looks like it is
>                 Cacti minus a lot of functionality and polish
>                 
>                 My opinion was reached after about 2 minutes of
>                 reading the provided
>                 cricket website.
>                 
>                 
>                 
>                 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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