Prometheus and Zabbix are popular network monitoring solutions. Zabbix stands out for its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, customizable alerting system, and extensive reporting options. Prometheus is praised for its powerful querying language, intuitive alerting system, and flexible data model.
Comparison of Prometheus and Zabbix features:
Room for Improvement: Prometheus reviewers mention a steeper learning curve compared to Zabbix and the need for additional tools for long-term storage and visualization. While Zabbix offers a user-friendly interface, some reviewers criticize its scalability for very large deployments.
Prometheus and Zabbix ROI: Both Prometheus and Zabbix are open-source solutions, making them accessible to use and benefit from large and active communities that provide support through forums and online resources. Zabbix also offers paid commercial support options. The ROI comes from improved infrastructure monitoring, leading to faster problem identification, reduced downtime, and optimized resource utilization. The cost includes setup, configuration, and potentially integrating additional tools with Prometheus.
Deployment and customer support: Prometheus has a simpler setup with a lightweight footprint. Zabbix requires installing an agent on each monitored system and configuring a central server with a database. Both tools offer extensive documentation for deployment. For larger deployments, Prometheus' horizontal scaling might be more favorable. Also, Prometheus integrates well with cloud-native environments due to its pull-based model.
The summary above is based on 74 interviews we conducted recently with Zabbix and Prometheus users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The solution offers an easy way to install and scratch values."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is the ease of pulling the metrics."
"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus are the many functions available. The functions are helpful for understanding the behavior of applications and infrastructure."
"The solution is useful to collect huge metrics."
"Prometheus is an open-source product that helps mold and improve it per our requirements. It is a lightweight solution that gives you many different metrics you can use in your application. The product offers complete granularity of your infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with other tools like Grafana, which offers dashboard visibility. Prometheus is an extensively used product. I haven't seen any organization that is not using it."
"There is less computing power needed for scaling."
"Templates are good. We download them from the official Zabbix site or the community. If the information we need isn't available, we create custom templates based on client requirements."
"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."
"The pricing of the product is reasonable."
"We are able to monitor our virtual infrastructure, virtual machines, windows servers, databases, and the network using a simple network management protocol. We are able to pull almost all the metrics that we want, receive notifications, and have them integrate with telegrams for certain devices that are critical, such as UPSs."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides network segregation for server monitoring."
"The initial setup was very quick. The first time it was long because I didn't know it yet. I was only using Windows. The first time was very difficult because of the operating system."
"The most valuable feature is network traffic monitoring."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
"The scalability must be improved."
"Its stability could be even better."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features to support custom use cases, like out-of-the-box test scenarios and threat-related use cases of its users."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"Prometheus' UI color can improve. Using the Prometheus UI for configuration or analyzing queries is a horrible experience."
"Zabbix is powerful, but it is difficult to understand initially. There are many things that can be improved, but we might not be using Zabbix to its fullest extent. The software has more features than we need."
"Documentation terminology could be improved."
"Zabbix claims that there is an auto-discovery process but my team member was facing difficulty and was told that it's not really automatic, and there are some manual steps."
"Even though it’s such a powerful monitoring system, it would be more helpful if it had a flexible UI."
"The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes."
"Outside of the normal standard monitoring, I would like to extend patching, importing patching, and supporting patching for Windows Servers."
"Implementation is always tailored to the customer and the kind of information we need from the client to carry it out can make them very uncomfortable. Sometimes the clients are not ready to share it."
"The networking monitor is not too easy to work with."
Prometheus is ranked 9th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 32 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 10th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 100 reviews. Prometheus is rated 8.4, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and Honeycomb.io, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Nagios XI. See our Prometheus vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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