BigFix, now supported by HCL Technologies since the acquisition of BigFix from IBM in 2018, is an endpoint management solution providing endpoint visibility and IT asset discovery, automated endpoint patching (BigFix Lifecycle and BigFix Patch) policy enforcement (BigFix Compliance), and software asset discovery for licensed and unlicensed software (BigFix Inventory).
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Zabbix
Score 8.6 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.
Patch Management for Diverse Devices: HCL BigFix is ideal for organizations with a diverse range of devices, including laptops, desktops, cloud, virtual machines, and mobile devices. Its endpoint management functionality enables seamless patching across various operating systems such as Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, and Linux.
Comprehensive Patch Management: With HCL BigFix, organizations can achieve comprehensive patch management across their IT infrastructures. It ensures that all endpoints, regardless of the operating system, receive timely and secure patches, reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing overall security.
Troubleshooting and Monitoring: HCL BigFix excels in providing a dashboard that effectively displays problematic and functional machines. This feature allows IT teams to quickly identify and address issues, improving overall troubleshooting efficiency. However, there are some scenarios where HCL BigFix may be less appropriate or areas for improvement: 1. Coverage Expansion: It is important for HCL BigFix to continue expanding its coverage to include all possible resources installed within the IT infrastructure. Ensuring comprehensive coverage can enhance its effectiveness. 2.On-Site and OS Upgrades: Optimizing the process of on-site and operating system upgrades can help streamline the deployment process further. Improvements in this area would contribute to a smoother and more efficient upgrade experience. 3.Communication Speed: Enhancing the speed of communication between the HCL BigFix agent and the server can help improve the overall responsiveness and efficiency of the solution.
Pricing Optimization: Adjusting the pricing of HCL BigFix to be more cost-effective would make it more accessible and attractive to organizations of different sizes and budgets.
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.
We have significantly enhanced our ability to patch desktops, including laptops, desktop, cloud, virtual machines and other mobile devices used by end-users. BigFix's endpoint management functionality allows us to seamlessly patch a wide range of operating systems, such as Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, and Linux systems, ensuring comprehensive patch management across IT infrastructures. We have established a track record of delivering secure and hassle-free patching solutions to our clients
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.
