Prometheus is a service monitoring and time series database, which is open source.
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Zabbix
Score 8.7 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.
It is easier to setup, but learning curve is quite moderately steep. Prometheus is a best-in-class tool for engineers and SREs in cloud-native environments. When extended with tools like Thanos or Cortex, it can rival commercial platforms in scale and capability—but requires …
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 …
This program works from the roots of the problem and creates a professional matrix for each of its users. This will give them more skills and resources to carry out tasks and reduce the difficulties of operating each of the processes of my work, as well as being An ally for the manipulation and operability of all your master data; Prometheus is very easy to recommend since it is a program that fulfills its mission.
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.
Customer Service: since this is an open-source tool, customer service is not that great. Generally, you get all answers to your problems in online forums, but in case you got stuck, nobody will assist you in a channelised manner. You will have to find the way out on your own, and it may become frustrating at times.
More metrics for dashboards shall be added per the application being monitored. Standards metrics will work in most cases but may not in specific applications. Therefore, customised metrics shall be created for some of the industry-standard niche applications.
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.
It is usable and one can learn if few people in the team are already using it. It can be difficult to understand at the beginning because of non intuitive UI and syntax of the rules. So, I've gone for 7 points as there is some room for improvement in user interface and rules syntax.
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.
Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with Grafana. It also has a sophisticated alert setting mechanism to ensure we don't miss anything critical.
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.
The ROI mentioned during the purchase has not been achieved, however this could be due to lack of data from our side. 2 years of implementation is too early to calculate and confirm the ROI.
