Roambi (discontinued) vs. Zabbix

Getting Roambi up to speed in your company certainly is a quick win. After just a few days, several of our reports were mobilized, interactive and automatically updated. Building Roambi reports is not hard to do; the intuitive interface allows virtually any type of user to create his or her own reports.

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.

Incentivized

• Report templates that are easy to learn, use, update and maintain.
• Great looking reports that stay up-to-date with what Apple is producing. When Apple rolled out the new look and feel to their iOS7 release, Roambi created a brand new set of reports within two weeks to go along with the iOS7 changes.
• Seamless integration with our existing BI environment, SAP Business Objects XI, 3.1. This drastically reduced the time from purchase to client-ready roll out from months to weeks.

• 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.

Incentivized

• cardex type of presentation is already innovated in roambi in 2012, even iOS safari browser idea was created from this cardex style
• blink view is only available for sap and ms sql
• roambi publisher is very user-friendly and understandable for non technical person as well

Incentivized

• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

Incentivized

I would definitely use Roambi again because of its ease-of-use, but its lack of customization ability makes it difficult to recommend to businesses as business needs are always changing. People are picky, and on the Roambi project, we were not able to fully live up to the customer's expectations, limited by Roambi's preset limitations.

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.

Incentivized

VERY easy to use. Only limited by how the graphs and data is initially set up.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have compared Roambi against Business Objects, Reporting Services (on tablet) and Cubeware Cockpit. All those solutions lack in support of touch capabilities and responsiveness. Roambi "feels" just right. There is no training required and users love to explore the application. Compared to Roambi all other solutions feel very technical and hard to understand.

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.

Incentivized

• Increased insights on customer success metrics (using a Layers report).
• Higher motivation of employees, better communication towards employees, tighter bonds with the company - because of Roambi Flow. Periodic Flow magazines with analytic capabilities are sent out to the employees, as we value frequent and meaningful contact - both ways.

• Good ROI when trying to get ahead of network related problems instead of waiting for users to complain
• Good ROI when doing upgrades or exploratory work on a neglected network
• Good ROI when showing usage trends to management showing higher actual usage versus what was thought to be happening