ConnectWise RMM is built upon the Asio platform and combines out-of-the-box automation coupled with robust automation that IT solution providers can use to deliver customized services to
their customers. ConnectWise RMM aggregates both software and human elements,
covers the spectrum of do-it-yourself (DIY) and do-it-for-you (DFY) delivery
options, and integrates an intelligent automation engine. It’s a solution that
reinvents how IT solution providers adopt, interact with and manage their…
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Zabbix
Score 8.8 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.
ConnectWise RMM is well suited for my small IT business to keep track of my many clients that a company like mine with less than 5 employees to monitor in one interface. It is very easy to implement, monitor and setup alerts. The monitor of patching is one of the main reasons we went with ConnectWise RMM. We use their ScreenConnect software as wells.
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.
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.
Automate (LabTech) would be the aforementioned "heavy-duty" kind of RMM tool. It's big, it's complex, and very capable compared to Continuum Command. That said, the impetus is very much on the service provider to configure and maintain nearly 100% of the product, whereas in Continuum Command there is a lot that is maintained by their team for you. Even without paying for the premium NOC services, the cloud-first construction and other specific features (like the Windows patch testing and delaying, etc.) are clear wins over the more traditional RMMs like Automate. Automate certainly wins in the technical prowess department. Its scripting engine and level of customization are unrivaled across basically all of the rest of the tools out there. As such, it will be very interesting to see what happens now that these two products live under the same roof. Hopefully, someday, a powerful hybrid of the tool that ConnectWise can focus all development on that harness the positives of each. Keep your eyes peeled...
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.