SolarWinds Pingdom vs. Zabbix

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.
$14.95
per month
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.N/A
Pricing
SolarWinds PingdomZabbix
Editions & Modules
Synthetic Monitoring
$10
per month
Real User Monitoring
$10
per month
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds PingdomZabbix
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SolarWinds PingdomZabbix
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds Pingdom
Chose SolarWinds Pingdom
We looked at a few other things, it seems that Zabbix and a few other open source monitoring systems could offer the same functionality, but when you start looking at the cost of the hardware to run those solutions as a highly available solution the pingdom cost seems much more …
Chose SolarWinds Pingdom
Some of the products mentioned here are much more "holistic solutions" for monitoring, analyzing, logging, alerting, etc., but for the use case, we use SolarWinds Pingdom. I think that SolorWinds Pingdom is much simpler and friendlier for configuring and maintaining. We …
Chose SolarWinds Pingdom
We selected SolarWinds Pingdom based on the feature set we desired, which was simply a monitoring solution for our websites and other critical network services. The decision to use SolarWinds Pingdom was based on the simplicity of their mobile app and website.
Zabbix

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
SolarWinds PingdomZabbix
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Pulseway
Pulseway
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
ThousandEyes
ThousandEyes
Score 8.9 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Nexthink
Nexthink
Score 9.1 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SolarWinds PingdomZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
7.2
(65 ratings)
9.0
(25 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(4 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(7 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(54 ratings)
5.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
SolarWinds PingdomZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds
I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
Read full review
Zabbix
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.
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Pros
SolarWinds
  • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
  • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
  • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
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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.
Read full review
Cons
SolarWinds
  • The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
Read full review
Zabbix
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
SolarWinds
Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
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Zabbix
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.
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Usability
SolarWinds
Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
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Zabbix
If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
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Performance
SolarWinds
Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
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Zabbix
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
SolarWinds
Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
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Zabbix
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.
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Implementation Rating
SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
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.
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Alternatives Considered
SolarWinds
  1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
  2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
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Zabbix
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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Return on Investment
SolarWinds
  • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
  • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
  • Its time to explore other alternatives.
Read full review
Zabbix
  • 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

SolarWinds Pingdom Screenshots

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