Armis headquartered in Palo Alto offers an agentless, enterprise-class security platform to address the new threat landscape of unmanaged and IoT devices, an out-of-band sensing technology to discover and analyze all managed, unmanaged, and IoT devices—from traditional devices like laptops and smartphones to new unmanaged smart devices like smart TVs, webcams, printers, HVAC systems, industrial robots, medical devices and more. Armis discovers devices on and off the network, continuously…
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Zabbix
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
We started an entirely new network segregation implementation for security policies. Armis was unparalleled at helping us find rogue static IP-assigned devices in our old network and helped us identify what they were so we could tackle the challenge of moving everything to the new network VLANs. Another use case is finding a specific device or a specific user account to track their activity. The layout is phenomenal, and the data is easy to understand and drill down into for further information. The new AVM (Asset Vulnerability Management) section is awesome to help us find the out-of-date devices or other risks on the network to figure out where we are most vulnerable and at risk. If you're looking for a way to have Armis auto patch vulnerabilities - that's only on the radar from what I've heard - but currently, it is an amazing tool for finding and detailing the CVEs and other risks. You can create policies to block specific risky behaviors, but currently, at the time of writing, there isn't any automated patching or remediation to known CVEs found on a device.
Zabbix is great for monitoring your servers and seeing alerts when the system uses too much CPU or memory. This allowed the system Engineer to be proactive and add resources to these systems to avoid interrupting the services. Especially servers running operations applications and services. This is one of the best usages for Zabbix.
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.
I've requested integration with Mosyle Manager for our Apple MDM products - it is on the radar but slow going - Mosyle has an API and a free 30-day trial, so implementation shouldn't be difficult - but honestly, other than that - Armis support has been astonishing, and there are so many integrations already - it's small potatoes.
Considering Armis has all the data collected and parsed - it would be nice to see a back-end system for those of us who are true nerds and want to really dig into the Syslog data and analyze packets directly - however, building some quick queries is probably easier if you know what you are looking for anyway - which is probably why this is a backward way of my own thinking and no fault of Armis at all. They make the interface so easy to use it's not necessary, but it hurts my inner geek.
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.
I think every organization, especially the IT department, needs a tool like this. I know of another product like Zabbix that gives a similar or the same solution, but its range makes it very useful. You can see almost all the device info in one place: disk usage, disk space, network usage, etc.
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.
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.
Armis is kind of a total conglomeration of a ton of different tools/systems, and depending on how you want to set it up can do almost anything a lot of these other tools can do - and in some cases, even better. It doesn't do software deployment or other things like SCCM I have listed, but the reporting side is so much better than SCCM's interface. As far as data breaches, user/device activity tracking, vulnerability outlook, network scanning, device identification, and agentless miracles of magic - Armis is the king.
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.
