New Relic vs. Zabbix

New - relic is well suited if you want to analyse the performance of your services and you want to improve it. Integration with multiple services with same account gives a clear picture of flow of your APIs if you have micro-service architecture. New-relic is less appropriate when you want to do logging of your system. As it does not emits every single calls

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• gives us an monitoring of all our underlying servers and also we can configure some alerts upon them like CPU and memory alerts.
• Kubernetes cluster monitoring with new relic for EKS gives us and minute details of our cluster utilisation like node usage, pods memory request and limits
• Network traceability for each and every request with response time analysis is great we can trace which component is responsible for generating response delay
• log managements of the logs the infrastructure is generating we can view logs through there only

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

• I would like to see sort of simulator inside the user interface, that way we can send requests directly from it to test some configuration instead of setting up a test environment in our end.
• It would be nice if the data ingestion can be filtered by APM's. That way we can know which application is ingested most data.
• It would be nice if we could ingest logs (apache, system logs, and other logs) and correlate them with the APM.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.

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

As an engineer, New Relic has been very quick and easy for me to pick up/install/use. It has been less easy for some of the less technical-minded folks in our organization and their UI still is inconsistent multiple years after refactoring their platform to be New Relic One.

Incentivized

If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly

Never observed an outage

Incentivized

there are times where browser cache will cause issues that require you to clear your browser before continuing.

Incentivized

There are times I feel that the initial support is lacking. And in some cases the automated responses of not hearing anything are annoying if the reason why there has been no movement is because we are still waiting to hear back from NR support. So, i think they should loose the automation as it can seem disingenuous

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's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.

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

New Relic is the most full-featured offering that we've found, and is incredibly easy to start using with a PHP app. The New Relic agent is installed as a PHP extension so it is able to monitor and track the performance of any PHP app being run by the web server. Other tools required the installation and setup of a PHP dependency at the application level.

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

Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless

Incentivized

• Less time debugging issues or letting issues go unknown
• We know of issues before our customers
• One common tool for logs, apm, infrastructure, and most alerting. Makes for easier developer experience.
• Cost is expensive and is one of highest engineering spends

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized