OpsGenie is an IT monitoring and incident response platform for development and operations teams, providing alerts and schedule management escalations. OpsGenie is now part of Atlassian since the late 2018 acquisition.
$0
up to 5 users
Zabbix
Score 8.5 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.
Incident response is well suited to OpsGenie, and this is where it really shines—whether it's an outage, a security incident, or similar. My experience is mostly with security, and it offers a great audit trail. It minimises the need to cut and paste from different platforms when creating reports and ensures that what was said and what was done (along with any evidence) is persisted and reflected in the incident detail.
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.
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.
OpsGenie New Jira design has made it difficult for those not familiar with that style.
OpsGenie could benefit from nested escalation flows for team schedules. Creating a product alert that uses and Tech Schedule as well as an Incident Manager Schedule that already exists would create less overhead and ease management.
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.
In general terms OpsGenie is a well done tool for solving the alert incident management, the usability is super ok during the configuration and during the alert. The main opportunity I found is the reporting and analytics section which is a little difficult to understand at a first sight and the refresh is not automatic, some little frictions but frictions at all
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.
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.
We also looked at PagerDuty but decided to go with OpsGenie as it had more features on the plan we needed compared to PagerDuty which would have required us to spend a lot more for what we felt were non-premium features. Everything felt like an add-on - automation for an additional $20 a user per month seemed like a lot on top of the base plan
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.
Helped us track bugs and issues that came up during product launch periods which reduced overhead that normally came with needing to manually contact the right team members
Prevented last minute breaking issues from falling through the cracks, decreased time to fix by automatically alerting the team members and allowing the product and project teams to easily see what active alerts are in progress
