N-able Take Control vs. Zabbix

I have used a number of remote access systems over my IT/MSP career, and Take Control stands out as the best I have ever used. If you are using the N-Able RMM I highly recommend, Take Control over the other options that can be integrated into the platform

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

• Take Control is really good at accessing a device with no end-user involvement. The user doesn't have to click on permissions or visit a particular site. We simply can take control of their device from the RMM dashboard.
• If Microsoft issues a patch/update, I can schedule a release of a mass install to all client sites at the click of a mouse from within my office.

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

• Performance on low-end machines.
• Verbosity when changing stream quality.
• File manager needs improving, dragging files causes graphical issues.
• Connection time needs to be reduced.
• Ability to adjust re-connection time.
• Integration with more password-storage applications.
• Screen blanking is buggy in some instances and makes the session unusable.

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

The interface needs a lot of updating. It's just too "busy."

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

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

We were primarily a team-viewer customer before this point but the continued increases on cost, feature issues as well as core functionality and load issues we were beginning to see on the host machines we started looking for other options. As we were already a solar-winds customer utilizing the SAAS and Take Control for our Managed customers it was a no-brainer to look into Take Control. After a short review and the fact that we are already very familiar with the system via our management dashboard, it was an easy yes

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

• We we're able to bundle Take Control into our RMM pricing removing the need to pay for a separate system and maintain its intergration
• Remote access is only a click away saving our techs time
• Reliable connection mean issues are resolved without having to 'fix' the remote access first

• 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