SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Zabbix

It is a well-suited software for monitoring and surveillance of your deployed nodes. The error-readability and filter options for filtering out logs and errors could be improved. But overall, it has a good UI design, is user-friendly, and is very easy to learn and access for new users.

Incentivized

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

• Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
• Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
• It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.

Incentivized

• 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

• Custom application monitors can be a little tricky to configure.
• Logic in custom alerts can be a little hard to follow and figure out.
• Inability to monitor certificates on custom applications or SQL Server.
• Can be a little slow at times with on-prem SQL server.

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

We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.

Incentivized

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

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.

Incentivized

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 tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

Incentivized

The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.

Incentivized

I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.

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

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Incentivized

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

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

Nagios requires far more manual work to configure than SolarWinds does, though that also encourages customization and perfect-fit solutions. Nagios also requires far, far fewer resources to run than SolarWinds: SolarWinds wants great gobs of memory and disk, while Nagios is refreshingly humble. Nagios starts working from the first minute, too, whereas SolarWinds needs lots of set-up time.

Incentivized

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

It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up

Incentivized

• Ability to sunset multiple legacy monitoring platforms.
• A single pane of glass across global locations (Enterprise Operations Console) simplifies monitoring for junior staff.
• A single toolset allows staff from across the global environment to share knowledge and quickly set up/modify monitoring.

Incentivized

• 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