Veeam ONE is virtualization management technology from Ohio based VMware partner Veeam Software.
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Zabbix
Score 8.6 out of 10
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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.
Veeam One works great for monitoring virtual infrastructure. However, other dedicated server monitoring apps do better with monitoring the individual VMs. Where it stands out is its reporting functionality, which allows you to forecast growth and keep track of how you are using your resources. It is also great for companies without a big monitoring budget, as there is a pretty functional free version.
Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.
Proactive Alerting - the product can provide email alerts to notify one of any issues in the environment.
Capacity Planning and Forecasting - it has the ability to provide an analysis of the current environment as well as provide a report to forecast future capacity requirements.
Monitoring and Reporting - the software can monitor you environment 24x7 with the ability to provide comprehensive reporting.
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.
The licensing is tricky to understand. You can have an enterprise BR license or a Veeam ONE license, and the split modules read from only one module where the license is actually loaded into it.
Documentation could be a little better.
It's not exactly pretty to look at. Themes and tweaks are pretty limited.
In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts.
Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable.
This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller.
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.
We rarely if ever call support, but overall Veeam is very responsive, quick to get a hold of, and knowledgeable in there help. Some companies get big like Veeam and their support drops off, but we haven't seen that with Veeam (but again, their products seem really solid and trouble free so we rarely need help).
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.
Veeam ONE does not stack up well against Prometheus because Prometheus is must more flexibile and customizable. AppDynamics and Veeam ONE are similar in that they excel with certain but different aspects. Veeam ONE with backups and AppDynamics with application performance.
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.
The most positive impact has been a centralized platform to manage all our vCenter Tags, which orchestrate all our BCDR solutions with Veeam.
Response time for analyzing system performance when there are issues has greatly increased due to the simplicity of the software, plus we have been able to allow access to application developers and managers to view and asses their servers when they feel there are issues, without the need to contact the infrastructure team members.
Zabbix simply makes it easier to identify, and subsequently resolve problems quickly
Zabbix gives one web page to look at to see a list of all on-going issue in a single place
Zabbix can automate response to alerts. For example, Zabbix allows you the customization to take a monitored server out of production rotation if it is identified as unhealthy
