PRTG vs Zabbix

• Very, very configurable. You can create all kinds of monitors for all kinds of things. Plus it has loads of suggestions out of the box. It can get complicated but monitoring is complicated. Pretty decent interface and good support - active community.
• I really liked how easy it was to add alerts by SMS. So easy to setup.
• I like their sizing models (for purchase). We're actually small enough that we are free. But it's not free as in stripped down - it's free because we don't use many "sensors" and don't honestly have the need.

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• Zabbix is able to provide us a single pane of glass for monitoring. It can handle Systems, Database, Network and application level alerts and send those alerts to the appropriate parties.
• Zabbix graphs all metrics that come in. This means it's easy to spot trends and create alerts based on when those trends cross user-defined thresholds.
• Zabbix allows for the escalation of issues. If someone sleeps through an alert in the middle of the night, it can easily be escalated to the next tier.

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• Windows Only: PRTG does not support any other platform. Personally, I do not like tools that run on Windows because Windows requires a frequent update, which means downtime. You want your monitoring tool to be as highly available and low maintenance as possible. That and you also require a server license and Windows consume more hardware resource than other platforms. PRTG needs to add support for Linux.
• Limited ability to do things in bulk. There is no way I know of to mass onboard devices or to mass edit devices. So you will by modifying 1 device at a time. For instance, it would be useful to modify the name or company of 200 devices in one shot.
• Somewhat weak widgets and dashboard. If you put a lot of effort into it, you can probably come out with a very useful dashboard to keep an eye on key systems/devices. However, some widgets can look nice at first but they are not so useful or easy to understand. Again, it can be done, but a lot of effort is needed to get it right.
• White interface only. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you have people who use the tool all the time to keep an eye on the system, it can strain your eyes. Need a dark theme.

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• The first time that you use Zabbix, it may not be immediately obvious where everything is or how to find exactly what you want, but I think that it's UI is constantly improving with each new release. Training is also a great resource to resolve these types of problems.
• While Zabbix allows in-depth customization of alerts to various applications (such as Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, or even SMS, etc.), I would love to see these options as built-in upon installation.
• I have personally never found the "Maps" feature of Zabbix incredibly useful as I find it complicated to configure, but I should probably investigate its documentation further.

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• Given us a nice, controlled, ringed-fence portal to deliver to customers for them to view monitoring on the services we sell them.
• Given us plenty of metrics to allow us to measure SLA's and OLA's.
• Given us the tools to deploy proactive measures for service outages.

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• By integrating Zabbix with Rundeck, we have been able to auto-resolve issues in our infrastructure which means lesser on-call alerts.
• Zabbix and PagerDuty let us response to business critical issues instantly.
• Zabbix dashboards and screens let us get an insight into the status of our infrastructure visually.

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