NETSCOUT TruView is a unified network monitoring and APM tool. TruView is deployed as hardware on-premises, and it can automate capacity planning and environment discovery and configuration.
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Zabbix
Score 8.8 out of 10
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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.
Netscout’s TruView monitoring system gives your IT department the perfect view of your network landscape. With the pulse hardware app, you can perform VoIP or HTTP network monitoring tests from specific remote locations and it will populate the analysis results into your console. This will give you perspective on how your sites are performing and detect any out of Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance even before users report it.
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.
The app monitoring gives you the details to set different filters and do a quick identification of the root cause of the problem.
Remarkable ability to store details of performance to analyze baselining, run advance troubleshooting, error detection and catalog by trends.
The ability to sync with a device/interface whether is physical or virtual gives me the standpoint to set analysis upon network traffic across LAN or WAN and also get the insight of Cloud segments, setting the triggers to find out where the behavior changes to non-production traffic.
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.
Product features are sometimes overwhelming if the IT team is not used to this technology. For a small and mid-size company, the number of settings and work that is needed to implement the solution could be a long and exhausting process.
A "lite" version of Visual TruView could help a lot to small sized environments looking to develop the solution.
I would like to add some mitigation tools for simple/common problems that could be easily managed by a monitoring tool like Netscout TruView.
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.
As mentioned before, our deployment success depended on their expertise. Recommendations and overall response from their support engineers was out of this world. We, as supporters ourselves, are very critical in regards to the response times and knowledge of support services representatives. Often they just want to resolve your ticket not caring about the result, or focus only on the performance review we could give them. That's a standard behavior in most overseas support centers. The TruView engineers and management cared about us, our needs, and how they delivered the help we needed.
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.
Visual TruView is a solid competitor with solutions such as SolarWinds NPM, Nagios, PRTG, or SolarWinds NTA. Why we chose TruView was because it goes straight to what we were looking for, no hidden modules or subscriptions to secondaries licensing terms, to get the results that we were expecting. TruView takes it to another level.
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.
Tool consolidation, an amazing GUI that shows the most from the very beginning helping the IT Teams to set their own dashboards according to their needs.
When they meant one price tag, that's it! You won't get a headache after the purchase process is done.
Better be ready to set the scales your organization requires because if you miss something in the design you could get an application size that overrides your initial budget.
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
