IBM Cloudability is a cloud cost management and optimization (FinOps) tool that enables IT, finance, and business teams to optimize their cloud spend across all cost sources, all maturity levels, and for all stakeholders.
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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.
I don't have much exposure to the tool. I mean, I'm relatively new to using it as a platform, but I haven't really seen the benefit, especially with the actual renewal talks at the company. I'm not seeing what AWS native solutions are, how probability improves on that as opposed to just using AWS and just, I don't know. I'm not seeing the benefit, at least in my eyes.
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.
For me, it is a lot of anomaly detection and I think there's a lot of improvement that can be made to show anomalies that happen over time because if it's just day to day or week to week, you may not see the change. But if you see the trend over a period of time, show me something that has grown 40%, 50% over the past three months and maybe you can do those things and we just haven't figured them out yet. So we are very new to the product, but I think anomaly detection for me is one of the bigger things.
Cloudability has been one solution for almost all of our FinOps needs. Except for Data transfer costs, we have covered all use cases and have made significant savings across our cloud infrastructure. Reporting has provided management a deeper analysis into their spending and helped them forecast their budgets for next year
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 gave the IBM Cloudability a 7/10 because it is good, but it could improve in some places. It is easy to get data uploaded and ready to view, but it is only up to a certain point in time, and not live data. As for how it looks, the interface is good for viewing, however navigation could be a little better, maybe supported with a roadmap.
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.
While there have been few support cases where the experience was good. But in multiple support cases it's firstly delayed and even after weeks or months of time, team is not able to provide us with the RCA of the issue. All they are claiming is the issue is now fixed which I still see coming back after few days or weeks as we've never identified and addressed the root cause.
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.
Training was adequate, but the real learning begins when you start using the product, like most things. All major functions were covered so as an entry point, was a good introduction to the product. The training pace was good as well, the areas were covered in decent depth, without being too much of an information overload.
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.
Before Apptio we extensively used the cloud native and in house automated and developed cost optimization tool using python , powershell and leveraging the various cloud native services like AWS systems manager , Azure Functions and Azure automation run books.
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.
