Colasoft Capsa vs. Zabbix

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Colasoft Capsa
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Colasoft Capsa is a network performance monitoring and protocol analyzing tool. Capsa provides core monitoring features, as well as automated diagnostics and packet decoding. Colasoft offers a limited free version of the software.N/A
Zabbix
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Pricing
Colasoft CapsaZabbix
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Colasoft CapsaZabbix
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
Colasoft CapsaZabbix
Small Businesses
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.4 out of 10
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PingPlotter
PingPlotter
Score 9.4 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Colasoft CapsaZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(25 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Colasoft CapsaZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
Colasoft
Capsa is highly recommended to be used in small dense areas of a network where it makes sense to be able to run analytics off of a mirror port to gain insight into traffic trends. It is a costly product to install in branch locations, and requires a decent spec hardware to run appropriately
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Zabbix
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.
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Pros
Colasoft
  • Robust Application. Able to handle traffic that most businesses will throw at it.
  • Easy to use. Easy to setup captures and filter down to specific traffic types.
  • Relatively cheap for what it's able to accomplish.
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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.
Read full review
Cons
Colasoft
  • Needs options to scale to 10Gb/s networks. The cutoff for performance looks to be around 3Gb/sl
  • Needs API access to trigger capturesl
  • Needs Agents for remote capturesl
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Zabbix
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Colasoft
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
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.
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Usability
Colasoft
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
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Support Rating
Colasoft
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
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.
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Implementation Rating
Colasoft
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Colasoft
Colasoft performs more like the traditional wireshark as opposed to other solutions that tend to focus on graphs instead of giving you the raw data. I personally prefer the raw data, and then the ability to build graphs upon this (which Capsa can do). This allows for quicker analysis and makes it easier to relate to.
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Zabbix
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.
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Return on Investment
Colasoft
  • While the product doesn't detect malware, it has helped track down malware infected machines by using data from other applications to run filters to look for known traffic destinations for that malware. For me this is a huge ROI since malware can be the great unknown.
  • Relatively cheap compared to the feature set.
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Zabbix
  • 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
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ScreenShots