The Oracle Management Cloud is a PaaS combining a suite of IT infrastructure and application performance monitoring solutions. On the standard edition the Oracle Management Cloud includes Oracle Application Performance Monitoring and Infrastructure Monitoring. On the Enterprise Edition the Management Cloud also includes Oracle IT Analyics and Oracle Orchestration. The Management Cloud is also available in a Log Analytics edition.
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Zabbix
Score 8.6 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.
Ideal for a complex organization with requirements to build very complex reports. Especially useful for organizations that already have numerous Oracle products and need to pull information from them. This tool works best when plugged in with other Oracle tools and databases. If you're a larger company, and/or if you're managing a lot of data, Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service is the perfect tool to manage your Oracle deployment. It provides a number of different options for intelligent analysis while not being too overwhelming to manage. Companies that want a robust tool to manage all data and present it in a visually appealing way to users will greatly benefit from this tool. The tool is very customizable and can be tailored to meet the needs of different users.
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.
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.
There's a pretty steep learning curve that needs to be overcome in order to properly deploy this tool. So, unless you're a seasoned IT administrator, you may have a fair amount of homework to do. Implementation and maintenance of this takes a bucket of consulting hours from outside consultants to come in and set up the tool and regularly maintain it, in the long run, this could be costly.
The dashboard is not as easy to set up as I would like, however, after setup it will serve your purpose in the best possible way. You may not be able to find out how some data related to another and you can create a report that you think has all the details you need, but it comes up blank because the data really is not connected.
There aren't enough self-learning materials available like tutorials and how-to videos. I would like to have access to more e-tutorials from inside the tool. A steep learning curve for most. It would be nice to have a robust learning portal within the application where users can access self-learning material directly from the application and step to spet guides on how to perform different tasks.
Does not provide the ease of adding additional data sources without lots of complications. Even though it can handle large data sets, rendering of reports can take a fairly long time if the parameter set is large. For some time it seems like processing takes a bit of time when large data sets are being used. This is not the case with other competing tools.
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.
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.
Oracle Analytics Cloud is an enterprise solution and can't be compared apple-to-apple with a data visualization tool like Tableau. This is not the same use at all. Before selecting Oracle Analytics Cloud, it is most important to consider the data you are looking to collect and how you plan to visualize it. Other tools like Tableau and microstrategy feel smoother to work with, have better UI's and are quicker when processing data. It is also important to think through how you will use the data across your organizations. Can have a steep learning curve but once you are well trained on this tool, the possibilities are endless. The tool is highly customizable and will generate what you design it to generate. If you are having issues with reports and analytics, it is most likely due to data quality issues. Oracle Analytics Cloud also benefits by adding Essbase in it, to perform multi-dimensional analytics.
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
