New Relic vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Zabbix

New Relic its an excellent tool for monitoring services used on the SAAS universe, like web servers, relational and nosql dbms, reverse proxies, text databases, etc. Its also a powerful tool to monitor resource usage on said servers. However, its not well fitted to monitor custom services - if you need to generate alerts based on logs or database information, for example

Incentivized

It is a well-suited software for monitoring and surveillance of your deployed nodes. The error-readability and filter options for filtering out logs and errors could be improved. But overall, it has a good UI design, is user-friendly, and is very easy to learn and access for new users.

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

• It gives us insights of applications, infrastructure, clouds very well.
• The alerting system in New Relic helps us to easily identify the root cause which reduces the MTTR.
• It has new features related to AI which helps to troubleshoot any problem in a very short time it gives future predictions also.

Incentivized

• Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
• Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
• It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.

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

• And while powerful, building tailored dashboards with organ-specific metrics (such as energy load variance across regions) can be difficult to navigate. The UI isn't as drag-and-drop easy, and query-based widgets typically involve some trial and error for non-devs.
• Alerts may be hypersensitive or over general. I We often get a spam of non-critical alerts while doing load testing, all overhauling to me alone and making it difficult to identify actual issues especially in energy systems where spikes are very common.
• With our expanding fleet of Iot devices, the per-host pricing model is becoming expensive, quickly. More detailed billing based on microservices, or that works at sensor level, would make it more adaptable for energy platforms.

Incentivized

• Custom application monitors can be a little tricky to configure.
• Logic in custom alerts can be a little hard to follow and figure out.
• Inability to monitor certificates on custom applications or SQL Server.
• Can be a little slow at times with on-prem SQL server.

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

The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.

Incentivized

We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.

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 have given this much rating as I am used New Relic in different sectors and for different use cases like its K8s monitoring, infra monitoring, full stack monitoring as compare to other tools New Relic gives data in a formatted and connected way, and also it is giving us value for money. It also launches new features day by day which helps users to track the issue very quickly. It also supports OTel integrations which is the latest trend of observability tools. thats why I had given this much rating to New Relic.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.

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

Never observed an outage

Incentivized

The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

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there are times where browser cache will cause issues that require you to clear your browser before continuing.

Incentivized

The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.

Incentivized

The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed

Incentivized

I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.

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

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Incentivized

It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

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

Data Dog has solutions that look more attractive, but not at their price point. We have also tried to build a solution straight from the Cloud, where our business is built, but some things are too hard to replicate. This shows that New Relic is useful and helps our efficiency.

Incentivized

Nagios requires far more manual work to configure than SolarWinds does, though that also encourages customization and perfect-fit solutions. Nagios also requires far, far fewer resources to run than SolarWinds: SolarWinds wants great gobs of memory and disk, while Nagios is refreshingly humble. Nagios starts working from the first minute, too, whereas SolarWinds needs lots of set-up time.

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.

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Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless

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It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up

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• We were able to quickly identify our most time consuming APIs. In some cases we were able to bring down times for some apis from 4s to 200ms.
• We were able to identify our slowest database queries and optimize them for quicker response times.

Incentivized

• Ability to sunset multiple legacy monitoring platforms.
• A single pane of glass across global locations (Enterprise Operations Console) simplifies monitoring for junior staff.
• A single toolset allows staff from across the global environment to share knowledge and quickly set up/modify monitoring.

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