ManageEngine Site24x7 vs. Zabbix

[Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring is] well suited in website monitoring where especially for uptime and availability of the website. Due to its cloud nature, the company has servers distributed globally that allow to check site availability from anywhere in the world.

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

• Very clean website UI. Tests are well categorized and navigation is very simple.
• The accompanying mobile app is very useful when on the go as it can also notify you of any issues.
• The cost of the platform is very cheap and the cost also scales at a low amount.
• No on-premise footprint. All cloud-based.

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

• Ability to edit an existing maintenance schedule, vs creating a new one each time
• Grouping of emails to SMS and non SMS alerts to save on false alerts
• Setup of Realtime user monitor was not as functional as expected with regard to adding 3rd party scripts.

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

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

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

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

The biggest difference between Site24x7 and products like PRTG, Nagios, or Icinga, is that Site24x7 is hosted off the network, completely externally. The others do a great job on network alerts-- and some can even be configured to send SMS or phone calls with the right equipment and plugins-- but they usually reside in the network or at least on-site. Hosting them in the cloud might be a way around that, in which case they would be pretty similar to Site24x7 in capability, but without the additional software costs in the case of Nagios and Icinga (both open source).

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

• Cost savings have been substantial at approximately 70%.
• We do suffer delayed email notifications and regular locational failures from 24x7. However, this is easily overcome by extra locational checks.
• Much quicker responses from out of hours teams with the benefit of the mobile app, which is user-friendly.

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