Likelihood to Recommend Apache Flume is well suited when the use case is log data ingestion and aggregate only, for example for compliance of configuration management. It is not well suited where you need a general-purpose real-time data ingestion pipeline that can receive log data and other forms of data streams (eg IoT, messages).
Read full review Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.
Read full review Pros Multiple sources of data (sources) and destinations (sinks) that allows you to move data form and to any relevant data storage It is very easy to setup and run Very open to personalization, you can create filters, enrichment, new sources and destinations Read full review Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on. Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit. Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already. Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on. Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available. Read full review Cons It is very specific for log data ingestion so it is pretty hard to use for anything else besides log data Data replication is not built in and needs to be added on top of Apache Flume (not a hard job to do though) Read full review In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts. Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable. This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
Read full review Usability If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
Read full review Support Rating Apache Flume is open-source so support is limited. Never the less, it has great documentation and best practices documents from their end-users so it is not hard to use, setup and configure.
Read full review The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
Read full review Implementation Rating We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Apache Flume is a very good solution when your project is not very complex at transformation and enrichment, and good if you have an external management suite like Cloudera, Hortonworks, etc. But it is not a real EAI or ETL like AB Initio or Attunity so you need to know exactly what you want. On the other hand being an opensource project give Apache a lot of room to personalize thanks to its plug-able architecture and has a very nice performance having a very low CPU and Memory footprint, a single server can do the job on many occasions, as opposed to the multi-server architecture of paid products.
Read full review We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.
Read full review Return on Investment Flume has simplified a lot many of our ingest procedures, easier to deploy and integrate than a classical EAI, reducing the time to market But opposed to EAIs if the project starts to grow in complexity Apache Flume project may not be as suitable Read full review Zabbix simply makes it easier to identify, and subsequently resolve problems quickly Zabbix gives one web page to look at to see a list of all on-going issue in a single place Zabbix can automate response to alerts. For example, Zabbix allows you the customization to take a monitored server out of production rotation if it is identified as unhealthy Read full review ScreenShots