Checkmk vs. Zabbix

In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.

Incentivized

Because we spread out in different locations, we can't always know the status of our devices. Zabbix solves this issue for us. As soon as we see an alert that the remote site is down, we can solve it right away. I can't think of a scenario where it was less appropriate for us.

Incentivized

• monitoring
• alerts
• Graphs

Incentivized

• Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
• Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
• Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software

Incentivized

• Layout
• Ease of Use
• Upgradability

Incentivized

• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

Incentivized

Very helpful software and I highly recommend to have on hand as a tool for testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.

Incentivized

Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the next 6 – 12 months as our needs expand.

Incentivized

The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking up against any other apps in the web.

Incentivized

• avoid downtime
• Plan updates based on usage of a VM or network switch to avoid impacting users
• User satisfaction increased due to less visible downtime or issues with our IT infrastructure.

Incentivized

• Zabbix has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.

Incentivized