Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Cortex Project VS RANCID

Compare Cortex Project VS RANCID and see what are their differences

Cortex Project logo Cortex Project

Horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.

RANCID logo RANCID

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.
  • Cortex Project Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-04
  • RANCID Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-08

Cortex Project videos

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RANCID videos

Puppet Perspectives - Rancid "Troublemaker" Album Review (feat. Dan)

More videos:

  • Review - Rancid Life Won't Wait Album Review
  • Review - Review: Rancid “Trouble Maker”

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cortex Project and RANCID)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Network Automation
0 0%
100% 100
Databases
100 100%
0% 0
Configuration Auditing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Cortex Project and RANCID. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, RANCID should be more popular than Cortex Project. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cortex Project mentions (4)

  • Self hosted log paraer
    Now if its more metric data you are using and want to do APM, prometheus is your man https://prometheus.io/, want to make prometheus your full time job? Deploy cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/, honorable mention in the metrics space, Zabbix, https://www.zabbix.com/ I've seen use cases of zabbix going way beyond its intended use its a fantastic tool. Source: 12 months ago
  • Is anyone frustrated with anything about Prometheus?
    Yes, but also no. The Prometheus ecosystem already has two FOSS time-series databases that are complementary to Prometheus itself. Thanos and Mimir. Not to mention M3db, developed at Uber, and Cortex, then ancestor of Mimir. There's a bunch of others I won't mention as it would take too long. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Centralized solution for Prometheus?
    You can use the Remote write feature to send to a centralized location. It would have to be scalable like Cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Building a distributed lab with an observability stack
    For a homelab I think prometheus + grafana is easy to get started and scales well. There are lots of ways to set up the architecture. Prometheus can write to a directory on a filesystem, it can be set to write to a remote server, and there are other projects to integrate object storage (s3, minio, etc) or influxdb for long term storage and downsampling. Source: almost 2 years ago

RANCID mentions (9)

  • Cisco switch backup/restore?
    A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Version control for network configs
    Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Management Software for Cisco Devices?
    RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What all are you doing with Ansible?
    If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Starting with python at 30
    Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cortex Project and RANCID, you can also consider the following products

Thanos.io - Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities.

Unimus - Unimus is a Network Automation and Configuration management (NCM) solution designed for fast deployment network-wide and ease of use. Unimus does not require learning any abstraction or templating languages, and does not require any coding skills.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Oxidized - configuration backup software (IOS, JunOS) - silly attempt at rancid

IRONdb - Circonus delivers Machine Data Intelligence for the most demanding use cases. Collect, store, manage, and analyze IoT and monitoring data at unprecedented volume and frequency.

GenieACS - A fast and lightweight TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)