DX Application Performance Management (formerly CA APM, or CA Application Performance Management) is an application performance management platform designed to correlate and analyze data in real-time. DX APM supports hybrid environments and customizable failure thresholds.
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Icinga
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
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Zabbix
Score 8.5 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.
While Icinga holds its own against old stalwarts like Nagios and Zabbix, it simply can't compete with the new generation of SaaS service/server monitoring software in terms of ease of use, feature-completeness, integration with things like Cloudwatch, CloudHealth, New Relic, …
Icinga was initially a fork of Nagios. Over time, the configuration language was replaced with something more programmatic. This configuration language is one of the big sellers of this product. It allows flexible, quick configuration of large sets of hosts and services with …
The best of commercial products is nearly as good at cross platform monitoring as Icinga, and all of them are expensive.
Zabbix
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix had the best support for the devices I initially had in my network, its ability to adapt and change has made it my Swiss Army knife of monitoring tools. While it could benefit greatly from a moderated zabbix community, its support from the open source community has …
CA Wily is well suited for monitoring the load balanced application nodes and determine their main performance bottlenecks like if problem exists in heap or in some connection issues. But I think when it comes to providing the entire report of the application, it is less appropriate as there is no way to create the entire report of the test for all the counters monitored. Also there is no way to detect some issues based on the system configuration.
Icinga is a world-class monitoring system. It can be used for most general monitoring situations. It is not a silver bullet, however, and there are instances where domain-specific monitoring systems are necessary. However, the output from those monitoring systems can be funneled into Icinga as a central monitoring and alerting system.
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.
Visualization of the metrics and data presented to provide a unique and attractive interface.
Flexibility to manage actions and commands that we deem important for each application. The ability to define these and customize the metrics reported for each individual application is huge for us.
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.
We are facing challenges to meet RFP requirements in few areas where I would recommend CA to improve.
We are facing challenges for non (java and dotnet application) which CA APM does not support. SAP is another solution where CA APM is not able to address our business requirement.
Icinga is a solid solution which does everything it promises. It is backwards compatible with most Nagios instances, making the transition very easy. Once you get the hang of installing new plugins and editing configuration files expanding its monitoring capabilities are easy.
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.
We only have 1 application using DX APM, while most of other applications are instrumented using Dynatrace. Dynatrace provides a better monitoring and instrumentation for applications. The required effort to setup monitoring capability using DX APM is way more work compared to Dynatrace, also the amount of KPIs offered from Dynatrace is more than DX APM.
Icinga is better than Nagios because of its nicer user interface. New Relic can monitor CPU/memory and disk usage, but it's more of a performance and application troubleshooting tool rather than monitoring
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.
Introscope is deeply utilized within the organization. However, CEM and Team Center not as much. Those that use one piece don't generally use the others. Partially because of the curve in learning how to use the consoles effectively.
reporting is pretty well configured and easy to setup if you know how to use the tools. So this can be easy to use and takes less time to configure for the different groups within the organization.
