Kibana vs. Zabbix

Kibana is indeed a powerful tool and has many use cases especially in environments that rely heavily on real-time log analysis and visualisation. Kibana’s ability to handle large volumes of log data and present it in an accessible, searchable format is invaluable. We use Kibana to monitor security related issues and it proactively alerts our Slack channels about any anomality or issues.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Fast searches with powerful index.
• Beautiful data visualizations.
• Real-time observability.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some performance issues with large datasets.
• Linking to dashboards makes extremely long urls.
• Lack of reports.

Incentivized

• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Its usability is generally good and it provides teams with a basic to intermediate understanding about data visualization. It is very user-friendly when it comes to creating dashboards. The UI is very good and simple. Its integration with other tools for alerting and reporting is amazing. But its advance features have a learning curve and a first timer needs some time to use the advance features.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We did not use the official Kibana support. Documentation was easy enough to follow.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Kibana is free; it was the first and only thing we've tried in this area.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Issues that affect checkout experiences for customers are able to be prioritized and solved quickly.
• We are able to more efficiently use resources due to the automation of reporting alerts. Decreasing employee resources needed.
• Visualization allows us to quickly share issues and explain to coworkers in order to escalate issues that can cost our bottom line.

Incentivized

• Good ROI when trying to get ahead of network related problems instead of waiting for users to complain
• Good ROI when doing upgrades or exploratory work on a neglected network
• Good ROI when showing usage trends to management showing higher actual usage versus what was thought to be happening