Nagios XI is an Enterprise Server and Network Monitoring Software, built on Nagios Core and designed to comprehensive application, service, and network monitoring in a central solution. Nagios XI is available in two different editions: Standard Edition and an Enterprise Edition. The Enterprise Edition provides users with additional functionality and includes features that are designed to aid in…
$1,995
Per Instance
Zabbix
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
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.
I like to be fixed rather than just dislike: it's not user-friendly with almost anything excluding a Windows Operating System. A Linux version, for example, is visibly backward. This does not seem to be a serious issue for most people, but it is still considered a disadvantage. …
We're using Munin in parallel to Zabbix, mostly out of legacy reasons. While Munin in the version used here only allows static graphs through image-files, Zabbix clearly wins here with the option to zoom in and out.
I used Nagios many years ago and it was quite similar to …
Nagios is best suited in an large organization where it is production 24/7, but in SME (small/medium enterprise) you have to pay a lot to the administrator. Instead use some graphical and easy to use tool like IDERA.
Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.
Extremely flexible and configurable long term storage of the very detailed performance information (years of per 1-5 min perf data numbers).
Small Nagios XI footprint (very efficient MySQL DB and flat files for perf data), making it powerful tool for thousands of checks and hundreds of reports.
Responsive support, willing to provide resolution outside the box and by various means possible.
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.
The mobile interface is newly developed and needs more development. It should provide more options for the audit log and add more detail for the configuration rollback options.
The scheduled report should be included in standard edition.
Master Node is configurable on LINUX platform only. We had to hire a Linux administrator
In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts.
Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable.
This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller.
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.
Only because I never give out 10s. Nagios support goes above and beyond in helping with issues, workarounds, specific cases and requirements. Tracks customer implementation and history of the most important issues. Can’t complain (except that the team is small and quite probably overworked). Time to resolution could be much improved if only there were more folks to help around.
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.
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.
Cost efficiency is the main reason which we opted [for] Nagios as we were previously using IDERA tool with comprehensive database monitoring solutions, but the slow performance we are getting while monitoring the instance of the database.
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.
Zabbix simply makes it easier to identify, and subsequently resolve problems quickly
Zabbix gives one web page to look at to see a list of all on-going issue in a single place
Zabbix can automate response to alerts. For example, Zabbix allows you the customization to take a monitored server out of production rotation if it is identified as unhealthy
