DX Spectrum (formerly CA Spectrum) vs Zabbix

Likelihood to Recommend

As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version

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Leandro Daniel Pacheco

IT Manager

CapgeminiInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

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From my stand point, [Zabbix is] very well suited for small and medium enterprises. The main benefit it is also it's worst quality: It is free / open source.You don't have costs to implement and to use it, but in the other hand you don't have a professional support or SLAs to rely on. In case you base your monitoring of critical systems on Zabbix and it has an issue, you need to appeal to the community and it can take a long time to have an answer or have your issue fixed.For these reasons I think it cant be the foundation of a monitoring process on large enterprises, but you can use it as a complement to have more flexibility.

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Oil & Energy Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pros

Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Aviation & Aerospace Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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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.

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Thomas Higgins

Infrastructure Engineer

Matthews InternationalInternet, 1001-5000 employees

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Cons

NOC
Data Center/Telecom

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Leandro Daniel Pacheco

IT Manager

CapgeminiInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

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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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Verified User

Director in Information Technology

Internet Company, 201-500 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Zabbix 10.0

Based on 2 answers

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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Thomas Higgins

Infrastructure Engineer

Matthews InternationalInternet, 1001-5000 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

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Zabbix 5.6

Based on 4 answers

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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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Telecommunications Company, 501-1000 employees

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Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

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Zabbix 6.0

Based on 1 answer

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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Thomas Higgins

Infrastructure Engineer

Matthews InternationalInternet, 1001-5000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Aviation & Aerospace Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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I personally prefer Zabbix over any other monitoring software that I have ever tried. Zabbix is so customizable that if there is a feature I need, I can easily implement it. I can then add that feature to a template in no time and have it applied to hundreds, or even thousands, of other servers. The performance of Zabbix and its ability to use proxy servers to gather data and report back to a primary node is also rather unique in my experience. Zabbix, being self-hosted, rather than a cloud solution, also prevents latency or routing issues from generating false alerts.

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Eric O'Callaghan

Linux Engineer

Thomas Jefferson University HospitalsEntertainment, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Proactive monitoring for networking
To many times to plan an update

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Leandro Daniel Pacheco

IT Manager

CapgeminiInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

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Zabbix has become my go-to solution for information gathering on our hardware. It's very easy to create reports and graphs outlining any specific metric I'm asked to provide.
Zabbix's alerting and script firing has made monitoring utilization on our network a breeze, while their alerting system allows me to fire off a different level of alert by the specific consecutive objects in an alert status. With time, I've been able to eliminate most end device alerts while just shooting off an alert for the problem at the root of an issue.
Zabbix is easy enough to use at the user level to be handed to non-tech savvy people with minimal training.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Hospitality Company, 501-1000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No