Solarwinds® Kiwi Syslog® Server is a syslog management tool for network and systems engineers. It receives syslog messages and SNMP traps from network devices (routers, switches, firewalls, etc.), and Linux®/Unix® hosts. Users can filter and view these messages based on time, hostname, severity, etc., and set up custom alerts. Kiwi Syslog Server has built-in actions to react appropriately to syslog messages. There are also log archival and clean-up features to help comply with security policies.
$319
Per Instance
Zabbix
Score 8.8 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.
To monitor syslog events Kiwi syslog much helpful and needed .Its saving human efforts and cost.Easy to check on GUI panel flow and status of server ,start and stop services we can do them from GUI panel it self . Recent version also no need C++ libraries to install .We can store the ingested events and archive based on our threshold criteria .We can import and export INI file which contain everything what we have configured
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.
Collection of SNMP traps a reliable and stable collection server for these is crucial to troubleshooting and time to ROS. Kiwi excels at this.
Easy to install set up and train users on.
The free version is a good free tool and handy to use for personal labs and other smalle use cases.
SNMP traps to user readable format is great, sometimes syslog and smnp messages can be hard to interpret and read with out a knowledge of how to do this.
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.
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.
Kiwi Syslog has the best usability of any syslog server. While not being able to offer the most features, the ones it does have are intuitive and easy to work with. Everything that it has is where you think it should be. If you can't find it in the menus, it doesn't exist.
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.
Because the solution is so simple to use and implement, support wasn't very necessary. The one time I did call them to better understand where logs were stored, they were very helpful and friendly. Kiwi has been around for some time and not a lot has changed over the years, so support for it is pretty straightforward and quick.
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.
PRTG is a great package and very useful, but the jump from the free 100 sensor price model to the first tier of the paid model is WAY too expensive. SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server is very inexpensive and provides us with the results we needed for log monitoring.
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.
