PingPlotter is a graphical traceroute and ping tool that visualizes network performance in a way that makes identifying the source of problems quicker and easier for everyone from online gamers and video streamers to VoIP admins and IT pros. Features for remote deployment, network monitoring, scripting, and a web interface are included along with several additional capabilities.
$0
per user
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.
I used Ping.app and UptimeLog.app on the Mac. These both provided different aspects. These two had a menubar to show me green or red for multiple connections. UptimeLog showed me very clearly when my connectivity was on or off and for exactly how long.
I've tried more products that are not in the list but PingPlotter is the easiest to use and the better one so far because of the interface and function.
PingPlotter has better visualizations and a stronger ability to capture historical data than other tools I've used. This makes it easier to find the root cause by looking back in the log data to find where latency or packet loss occurred.
A balance of a generic tool vs a network equipment product is necessary when investigating network incidents or disruptions. Need to train the engineer to use both tools to perform their analysis and to dive down to the issues as fast as they can. Experience with the tools will …
PingPlotter stacks up very well to Solarwinds NPM and can provide many of the same benchmark tests that Solarwinds can. PingPlotter is most certianly much better at doing Traceroutes than NPM, and you can run a lot of the same reports.
PingPlotter is a basic version of Auvik, although it is easier to setup and there is less intrusion in the customers network. This allows us to use PingPlotter as a prospecting tool and allows to accurately gather network information very quickly. Basic troubleshooting is great …
I have tried a few free products and some paid ones but never really did what I wanted. I just needed a simple, always-on link monitor specifically with a traceroute element and this is what PingPlotter delivers. The others were either overly complex or too expensive, some just …
The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking …
As I have mentioned before, its free, open source, very customizable and easy to use. I think anybody with minimum networking or computer knowledge can watch tutorials and implement this solution easily. Also it has great community support and forums
Well, I am not a decision-maker here, but I believe Zabbix has been adopted as a default choice to be integrated with Nokia OpenStack because of its simplicity of usage & other products were not matured at that time. Single GUI can be used for infrastructure as well as workload …
Zabbix is very easy to configure and this tool provides a more active alert system. We have evaluated ipMonitor and CloudWatch but the scope for sending alerts is very limited and this tool is very efficient in sending alerts through emails, MS Teams, and even on SMS. We are …
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 …
We're using Munin in parallel to Zabbix, mostly out of legacy reasons. While Munin in the version used here only allows static graphs through image-files, Zabbix clearly wins here with the option to zoom in and out.
I used Nagios many years ago and it was quite similar to …
Although we still use Cisco Prime for network devices, when comparing Zabbix with Nagios, for example, you see that Zabbix is more robust, stable, easy to deploy and has an enterprise focus that other tools don't have. Also, the fact that the Zabbix community is very active is …
Most of the SolarWinds are separated out, whereas Zabbix includes templates and capabilities for all of them out of the box. Other solutions listed include most or all of them to varying degrees as well.
New Relic is more for Application Monitoring, but the New Relic …
Zabbix was adopted in our framework due to the value, the hardware requirements, the knowledge we had available and the vast documentation on the internet.
Zabbix is a great, free solution. While not everything is discovered and configured out of the box, it is a powerful tool that allows for complete customization to what your organization needs as far as a monitoring solution. We've invested the time to make Zabbix powerful, …
Zabbix was much better at handling traditional systems, and in ease of customization, both in the system itself, and customizing data sources, such as adding deep MySQL or JMX integrations. It's very good for organizing large-scale (hundreds or thousands of servers) systems; …
I personally prefer Zabbix over any other monitoring software that I have ever tried. Zabbix is so customizable that if there is a feature I need, I can easily implement it. I can then add that feature to a template in no time and have it applied to hundreds, or even thousands, …
More extensive and customizable than SaaS solutions. Much less learning curve than Nagios. Cost is very much lower than SaaS monitoring especially at scales over 1000 hosts ($15,000/month for SaaS!!) Templating systems allows for easy management and monitoring of groups of …
Zabbix is cost effective maybe and certainly a good tool but not the best. The other ones have features that Zabbix is missing and we use couple of them.
Zabbix had the best support for the devices I initially had in my network, its ability to adapt and change has made it my Swiss Army knife of monitoring tools. While it could benefit greatly from a moderated zabbix community, its support from the open source community has …
Nagios has some advantages over Zabbix like "flapping" detection and multiple alert levels - Error, Warning and OK. However, the disadvantages of Nagios like needing an addon (NRPE) to monitor remote system internals (open files, running processes, memory, etc), no charting of …
Nagios will always be at or near the top, but I really like how sleek Zabbix is. Also, once it's up and running its really helps keep things in order for you and your customers. As for PandoraFMS, it would have beat out Zabbix, but the documentation on PandoraFMS is really …
I have had feedback that Splunk is a more out-of-the-box solution. With some fine tuning, it is possible to get the same robust functionality from a Logstash and Zabbix integration. The setup is more taxing, but you avoid paying the costly Splunk fees. So it all really depends …
I'm mostly familiar with Zabbix, but I've also started working with OpenNMS more recently. It appears that they're very comparable, the major difference being that OpenNMS supports SNMP Traps natively and can import MIBs which I was never able to figure out with Zabbix. Like …
It is well suited for performing monitoring and testing from a single device. It is less appropriate if you have to monitor from multiple different endpoints. That type of deployment would be more of an enterprise application. If you are looking for an end user monitoring solution then PingPlotter is the one for you.
Because we spread out in different locations, we can't always know the status of our devices. Zabbix solves this issue for us. As soon as we see an alert that the remote site is down, we can solve it right away. I can't think of a scenario where it was less appropriate for us.
Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software
Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.
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.
I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.
Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.
I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.
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.
I used Ping.app and UptimeLog.app on the Mac. These both provided different aspects. These two had a menubar to show me green or red for multiple connections. UptimeLog showed me very clearly when my connectivity was on or off and for exactly how long
The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking up against any other apps in the web.
Zabbix has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.