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SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) vs. Zabbix

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.N/A

    Zabbix

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AZabbix 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.N/A
    Pricing
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Zabbix
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Zabbix
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Zabbix
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Datadog and Log Monitor are doing great in bringing in new technologies for monitoring, however SolarWinds has still got edges since we are using it [for] many years. By using [it], we know that their product development team was always on top of new technologies monitoring. …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    • Good performance of the application
    • Visually well designed
    • Really useful topology creation in comparison to most competitors
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    If you used these two products, you know the difference. It's too vast to explain here. PRTG does have its place in a network, but SolarWinds is the high bar in this space.
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    We settled on VMan as it had the best support out of all the products, but also was built on Windows infrastructure with agentless monitoring which was a requirement.
    Incentivized
    Zabbix
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    15 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    15 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    12 Answers
    90%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Zabbix
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    Medium-sized Companies
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    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Zabbix
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (66 ratings)
    8.3
    (28 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.6
    (4 ratings)
    Availability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.8
    (6 ratings)
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Zabbix
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    SolarWinds
    • I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
    • I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
    • Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
    • Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    SolarWinds
    • We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    SolarWinds
    Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    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
    Read full review
    Usability
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    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
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    SolarWinds
    We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    SolarWinds
    We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    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
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    SolarWinds
    The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    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
    Read full review
    Scalability
    SolarWinds
    Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    SolarWinds
    • VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
    • VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
    • VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zabbix
    • 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
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots

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