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.
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Zoho Desk
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Zoho Support is a Saas help desk / ticketing system aimed at SMBs. I competes most often with Zendesk, and Desk.com.
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.
The user friendly android and IOS applications are one of the best features of Zoho Desk although if you are expecting a Desktop application then you will be disappointed and will have to access it from your browser which can be slow sometimes, depending on your internet connection. The work flow of tickets submission either manually through the dashboard or mobile application, and tickets assignment to other agents along with tracking tickets and agents' performance is very easily executed with no issues being faced.
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.
Report features give the all insights of the customer team and customer support which enables us to make changes according to it.
The best thing about Zoho Desk is that it has a very beautiful and fully designed dashboard.
I have been using this software for a very long time in my organization, it is very easy to use with having the interface created on a very advanced module.
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.
When utilizing as a ticketing system, it would be nice to have a better way to monitor when something is due. It's just a little cumbersome.
Search Functionality - The search functionality could use a tweak or two. Too many times I am unable to find tickets. This would also be very helpful for the "Recycle Bin" when you just need to find that ticket you accidentally deleted (we are all human!). :)
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.
At times Zoho [Desk] can be a bit glitchy. It does not auto refresh on the ticketing system, and even f it tells you there is a new ticket clicking it does nothing and you need to refresh the page for it to work. We have found at times that is can become unresponsive, although this usually doesn't last for longer than 15-30 mins.
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.
Zoho Desk has a technical team of professionals, who are well informed, and they know how to share the knowledge with the other players. Besides, they are competent in dealing with all kinds of customers, from divergent locations, and adopt their differences. Lastly, when called upon to solve an issue, they are quickly responsive.
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.
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.
We selected Zoho Desk as we needed a platform that was going to allow the business to grow through both usage and staffing numbers. We wanted something cost-effective but still offered standard features in an effective cloud-delivered solution but would still allow customization by our internal dev team, to derive better value from the service where it natively didn't do what we needed it to. FreeAgent was okay for a while, but Zoho Desk has allowed a vast improvement in our service offering to end customers.
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
Zoho Desk has created an organised sytem of support which alows me to help my customers more efficiently.
By saving resolutions as articles, Zoho Desk has provided a training resource for current customers and support staff as part of solving problems.
All new customers become part of a database of customers who continue to receive support and education from forums created by the articles and customer questions.
