Watchman Monitoring vs. Zabbix

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Watchman Monitoring
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Watchman Monitoring is a read-only IT Alerting, hardware monitoring, & high-availability beacon reporting SaaS designed for resale by IT professionals looking to provide proactive support to their offerings. The Watchman Monitoring Client has a single focus: to detect and report issues.
$79
Up to 25 Devices
Zabbix
Score 8.6 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.N/A
Pricing
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
Editions & Modules
Watchman Monitoring
$79.00
Up to 25 Devices
Watchman Monitoring
$79.00
Up to 25 Devices
Watchman Monitoring
$199.00
Up to 1500 Devices
Watchman Monitoring
$199.00
Up to 1500 Devices
Watchman Monitoring
$299.00
Over 1500 Devices
Watchman Monitoring
$299.00
Over 1500 Devices
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
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
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
Top Pros
Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Features
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
Monitoring Tasks
Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Product A and Product B
Watchman Monitoring
9.7
1 Ratings
20% above category average
Zabbix
-
Ratings
Remote monitoring10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-device monitoring10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated alerts and notifications9.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
Watchman Monitoring
7.0
1 Ratings
5% below category average
Zabbix
-
Ratings
Software and hardware inventory7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting
Comparison of Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Watchman Monitoring
7.5
1 Ratings
1% below category average
Zabbix
-
Ratings
Customizable reporting7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Risk analysis8.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
Small Businesses
Atera
Atera
Score 8.9 out of 10
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
ManageEngine Site24x7
ManageEngine Site24x7
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
ManageEngine Site24x7
ManageEngine Site24x7
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(25 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Watchman MonitoringZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
Watchman Monitoring
If you are in IT consulting or manage any fleet of computers, both Mac and PC (and yes Linux) - you should have this installed. It will be able to provide you the information needed to repair computers and avoid productivity loss by users.
Read full review
Zabbix
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.
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Pros
Watchman Monitoring
  • Super easy to deploy.
  • Integrates well with ZenDesk and YourComputerInventory.com.
  • Website is very clear and email to manage.
  • Support is awesome.
  • Super lightweight package.
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.
Read full review
Cons
Watchman Monitoring
  • Would like to see non-computer deployment agent - such as Synology.
  • Since it's mainly reporting, this isn't necessary improvement, but it would be good if it can receive data - so in case we can't ping a machine, maybe use Watchman as a backdoor - but that would go against it's main principles.
Read full review
Zabbix
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Watchman Monitoring
No answers on this topic
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.
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Usability
Watchman Monitoring
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
Read full review
Support Rating
Watchman Monitoring
No answers on this topic
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.
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Implementation Rating
Watchman Monitoring
No answers on this topic
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Watchman Monitoring
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Watchman Monitoring
  • I've been using it since the day it came out - there have so many times where a machine has had an error reported by Watchman that we've been able to save the client before something terrible happened.
  • The ROI is there - you can easily resell this product to your clients, or wrap it into your product offering.
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Zabbix
  • 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
Read full review
ScreenShots

Watchman Monitoring Screenshots

Screenshot of Provide Proactive Support. Watchman Monitoring’s white-labeled cross-platform monitoring & read-only IT alerting solutions help IT professionals avoid downtime, reduce time spent troubleshooting computers, increase recurring revenue, better manage support tickets, and to provide proactive support to their clients.