Nagios Core vs. SysAid vs. Zabbix

Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.

As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.

Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.

Incentivized

In our case, SysAid helps us manage all company incidents, as well as automatically handle onboarding and offboarding processes through rules. It also keeps us up-to-date on asset monitoring and software and operating system updates. Furthermore, thanks to its integration with Azure, it helps us effectively manage our Active Directory in the cloud. Currently, we are working extensively on feeding data to our internal chatbot and the environment's data pool to further facilitate incident resolution. These recurring processes allow the IT team to focus solely on the most critical incidents, freeing up more time for new tasks and projects. Ultimately, SysAid greatly simplifies the daily work of both end users and IT administrators. En nuestro caso SysAid nos ayuda a llevar toda la gestión de incidentes de la empresa además de gestionar automáticamente mediante reglas procesos de onboarding y offbording, llevar al día la monitorización de los activos y de las actualizaciones tanto de software como de sistema operativo, también nos ayuda a tener una buena gestión de nuestro directorio activo en la nube gracias a la integración con Azure, actualmente estamos trabajando mucho con la alimentación al chatbot interno y el datapool de datos del entorno para facilitar aún más la resolución de incidentes. recurrentes estos procesos ayudan a que el equipo de TI se centre unicamente en los incidentes mas relevantes teniendo mas tiempo para tareas y proyectos nuevos. En definitiva SysAid nos facilita mucho el trabajo diario tanto a los usuarios finales como a los administradores de TI. This review was originally written in Spanish and has been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.

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

• Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
• Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
• Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.

Incentivized

• Help Desk Ticketing works well and integrates easily with e-mail. IT staff is immediately notified when a new ticket is created.
• Device management and inventory is easily tracked within SysAid. A full report is easily generated for a device detailing hardware and software specifics.
• SysAid Copilot AI is phenomenal. It has been designed with the end user in mind. The user can speak to the prompt in natural language and expect a custom response according to their incident or service needs.

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

• Nagios could use core improvements in HA, though, Nagios itself recommends monitoring itself with just another Nagios installation, which has worked fine for us. Given its stability, and this work-around, a minor need.
• Nagios could also use improvements, feature wise, to the web gui. There is a lot in Nagios XI which I felt were almost excluded intentionally from the core project. Given the core functionality, a minor need. We have moved admin facing alerts to appear as though they originate from a different service to make interacting with alerts more practical.

Incentivized

• The Help tool could use some refining. Particularly indicating the order in which steps must be done. A clear example is the creation of customized fields or lists.
• Formatting of the ticket. There is no possibility to create dynamic tables, use more than one column. I would want to have more flexibility without having to pay for Professional Services

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

We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.

Incentivized

This rating reflects our overall satisfaction with the platform’s performance, reliability, and flexibility in meeting our IT service management needs. SysAid has streamlined our ticketing processes, enhanced asset management, and improved operational efficiency through automation and reporting. The system’s adaptability across multiple departments has added significant value beyond IT. An excellent service tool.

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 Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.

Incentivized

Whilst it delivers on most of the features it comes with, I feel Change Management needs a complete re-do as it is really complicated, and think it should be made to be straightforward. For the free services of their Market Place, they should develop a platform where one can just browse for the script (downloaded) and apply the patch, without having to go into various places in code to activate the service. or at least, build the integrations into the system and have [a] section under settings, or even straight from the Market Place, where one can just enable the service, and if required, be prompted to input additional information, including credentials.

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

Another of the benefits of sysaid is that it is highly available when working in on-premise environments.The only times the system is down is when a restart of the services is required to add a new feature. Apart from that, we have not had any problems.In the case of the cloud, the only condition I have seen where sysaid is not available is because the internet link is down or damaged.

Incentivized

In the case of system performance, I have seen that no matter the number of assets and users, Sysaid responds in the same way and at the same speed. The reports that are scheduled do not have any details because they arrive directly to your email. In the same way, when it is integrated with other systems, for example through the API or by email, we have not seen any failure due to the integration. It works very well with or without integrations.

Incentivized

I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.

Incentivized

SysAid support is fast and effective. They support their own product, so they know it well. I can expect a response to my request in less than 24 hours and often in less than an hour. Their sales, customer support, and technical support staff are experts in the area of the support request ticket, so we seldom are transferred to another support agent. Their system is well designed and one of the best of all the applications we use.

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

My team was greatly assisted and trained well. Despite the time zone difference the trainer made every effort to be available during times that were suitable for us and the assistance and help offered was extremely appreciated by my team. A wonderful experience by the team.

Incentivized

The training I received was very good, they gave me tasks to carry out and then they checked what I had done.It was gratifying that the instructor noticed that I had made very fast progress because I had done the implementation myself and it was very fast. At least I remember that after 5 days I had already finished almost 90% of all the implementation tasks.

Incentivized

It is recommended that it be synchronized with the active directory for a better experience, also using the network scanning tools are very useful both to maintain your hardware and software inventory. See all the documentation found on the portal where they suggest good practices for the use of SysAid and exploit it from the first time

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

Because we get all we required in Nagios [Core] and for npm, we have to do lots of configuration as it is not as easy as Comair to Nagios [Core]. On npm UI, there is lots of data, so we are not able to track exact data for analysis, which is why we use Nagios [Core].

There are many items offered on the other platforms that SysAid does not have. However, for a smaller or medium-sized business that needs a simple and easy way to get tickets flowing and allow users to help themselves, this is an excellent way to start.

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

When we purchase it, the plans were different and mainly we acquired lifetime licenses. in the past year, we migrated to the cloud version. In both cases, the pricing structure was accurate, although they could provide some extra flexibility to pay for exactly what we need in the business.

Le doy esta calificación porque los módulos que contiene se pueden usar para casi cualquier departamento, tanto gestión de tickets como inventarios de equipos, hemos utilizado una versión gratuita en Ingeniería para gestionar sus tiempos en las tareas asignadas, es lo único que utilizan pero podrían usar fácilmente el módulo de inventario para su herramienta y el módulo de proyectos también

We have used SysAid since 2008. Through out these years, we find that SysAid support is very helpful and professional. The respond that we get is very fast and they will help us until we have solved our problem that we reported to them. So far, we are very happy with SysAid support.

Incentivized

• With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
• You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.

Incentivized

• Our resolution time has increased a lot compared to not using a ticketing system.
• We have reduced communication load significantly for our helpdesk admins.
• The knowledgebase is rough, but still allows us to preserve and share our collective experience and expertise.

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