ignio AIOps, from Digitate in Santa Clara, is a solution designed to improve business agility by creating a unified view of the IT estate, connecting business functions to applications and infrastructure. This is combined with behavior profile of systems and applications that is continuously learnt using this blueprint. ignio aims to improve the transparency of complex Enterprise IT landscapes.
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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.
It's good for issue resolution, user access request automation, standard report generation, health checks, executing self-healing as configured in the attributes. Currently not good at real-time monitoring to trigger an action. Health checks have to be on a scheduled basis.
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.
There is a lot more the desktop tool can do. For example, we need to apply an upgrade to get the tool to talk to our infrastructure while employees are working from home. The tool was initially installed with the assumption that the desktops would be in UserLand. Instead after COVID-19 the desktop/laptops have been used for over a year on people's home networks. As of right now, we have to sync when the devices are connected to VPN. Moving forward with the upgrade, we will be getting this data over TLS when they are connected to the untrusted networks.
The concept of ignio AlOps requires OCM efforts within most operational teams. This isn't necessarily the fault of the tool itself, but when implementing ignio, or any AIOps tool, the team will get a lot of pushback as an outside team is centralizing the operational improvements. The tool should have a centralized intake process that will allow the collection, ranking, and management of automation opportunities. ignio AlOps should then simulate the proposed efficiencies from implementing something within the backlog. Right now a lot of local teams are having a hard time getting on the same page as the enterprise teams, and a common methodology for prioritizing (even if overly simplistic) would go a long way to enterprise planning.
These tools are very new and things get added to them all the time. There should be a way for the product's stakeholders and process owners to understand the additional value ignio AlOps is gaining over time.
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.
ignio AIOps version upgrades were a heavy lift. Having to learn a new language versus an industry standard language took time. More consideration on overall internal long-term support needs to be determined.
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.
We have built a healthy relationship with the vendor support team throughout the implementation phase, all incidents raised were resolved within the SLA without a fail
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.
I am happy with the way team has implemented and shared the product for our organization. However, would like to see it get extended to the other line of business too.
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'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.
