Likelihood to Recommend If you're a sysadmin, or anyone who's had to deploy network services, you've almost certainly had to use Nmap at some point or other. Need to see what devices are on your LAN? Nmap can tell you that. Want to check which ports your web server has open to the internet? Nmap is your friend.
Nmap is a powerful command-line tool and has many options that require some reading of documentation to get the best out of (although generally straightforward). If the thought of working at the command-line scares you (presumably not if you're reading this review), then you may want a much simpler tool, or at least check out Zenmap GUI.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros NMap provides a very fast and a very thorough network "sweep" that allows you to quickly map out exactly what's on your network. NMap is highly configurable. The "canned" choices are very good in most instances, but using various switches and options, you can create a very specific scan and get exactly the results you're looking for. NMap is easy to use. Even a new administrator will be able to use the graphical version (Zenmap) with efficiency right away. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
Read full review Support Rating There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Alternatives to Nmap (other IP scanners) are often much more limited in what they can do; They often only allow you to scan a specific subset of ports or a limited number of IP addresses in one command. Nmap is unrestricted in that regard. What makes Nmap stand out above the rest, is the complete network analysis package you get with it. It allows IP scanner, network deep-dives, hardware analysis, vulnerability analysis, encryption detailing, and so much more, in one free application
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Nmap with Wireshark is free, so it's been a great combo team to gather info and test. It's allowed us to avoid fines from false positives and to fix actual issues ourselves. Great for finding hosts, helps keep the network secure. Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots