We compared IBM SevOne Network Performance Monitoring and Zabbix across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: IBM SevOne NPM users like its modular design, performance management reports, and real-time insights. The solution is also praised for its SNMP data collection and integration with ITSM solutions. Zabbix is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and reliable performance. It provides customizable dashboards, trigger dependencies, SNMP monitoring, and problem tracking.
Room for Improvement: IBM SevOne NPM could benefit from better SD-WAN capabilities and live maps. Users say the solution could also improve its AI/ML modules and provide more actionable insights. Zabbix could reduce false positives and improve integration, cloud monitoring, and reporting.
Service and Support: Customers reported generally positive experiences with IBM customer service, praising the support team's availability and responsiveness. However, some users said they would rather not have to rely so heavily on support for upgrades. Users had mixed opinions about Zabbix customer service. Some found it helpful, while others feel it needs improvement. Customers generally rely on online documentation and community forums for assistance.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM SevOne NPM is described as quick and uncomplicated, although some users may require extra configuration. The complexity of Zabbix's initial setup varies, and it may require an experienced group of administrators and engineers.
Pricing: IBM SevOne NPM is seen as costly, particularly for smaller businesses. Zabbix is a free, open-source solution, but users can purchase support services and additional features.
ROI: IBM SevOne NPM offers features such as device maintenance and out-of-the-box reports that contribute to its value. Users say that Zabbix provides a cost-effective solution.
Comparison Results: IBM SevOne NPM stands out for its real-time insights, integration capabilities, straightforward setup, and top-notch customer service. Users say the solution could improve its AI/ML capabilities and lower its pricing to be more affordable for smaller businesses. Zabbix is a highly customizable open-source solution with a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including the ability to monitor virtual machines and databases. However, Zabbix’s setup can be complex and may require technical expertise.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The comprehensiveness of this solution's collection of network performance and flow data is one of the basics in the field for what it does. It meets all of our needs. So for all those areas, for the most straightforward collection capabilities, right up to NetFlow and even telemetry, it meets all those demands. Not only just basic or fundamental SNMP collection capability, but the product also supports what we need for the future with telemetry streaming. So it's very comprehensive."
"I like SevOne's network flow reporting."
"We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for other people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem."
"In 90% of the cases, new devices are plug-and-play, so when a new version comes out then SevOne has support for it out of the box."
"Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us."
"Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It's much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic."
"Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair."
"One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast."
"The most valuable feature is monitoring."
"We detect problems before the customer does and before it actually happens using the predictive functions in Zabbix."
"There is a problems page that shows us every warning or problem that occurs on our VMs globally. The map screen is also really useful because this is something that was missing. I don't know every other tool in the market. So, I don't know if this is a good point of only Zabbix, or other tools are also doing it, but from my point of view, this is the most useful page that I use, along with the problems page that efficiently lists the problem, recovery time, ending hours, starting hours, and so on."
"The most valuable features in Zabbix are those that help us overcome bottlenecks in CPU usage, as well as reduce memory delay. I know that we have only reached the tip of the iceberg of what Zabbix's features can do for us, and we have not used all of them yet."
"Health and communication links availability."
"The most valuable feature is service assurance."
"It not only provides the preconfigured item monitoring feature, but it is also easy to configure custom items."
"The product is very stable."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development."
"Would benefit with the addition of AI modules for proactive data insights."
"With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information."
"Some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility."
"The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages"
"There are some tweaks and enhancements that I've already requested. One is to be able to make changes per device rather than as a global setting. That has to do with naming. It's minor."
"The reporting of NMS is good, but it could be better."
"The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization."
"The GUI could be more intuitive. Also, we'd like streaming telemetry. Zabbix might have this feature, but I haven't seen it yet. It took us a long time to get started because the documentation isn't very descriptive. We had to go through various sources like YouTube and forums to get this solution working."
"Zabbix does not draw automatic mapping of the network, this is something they should add in the future. There is a lot of effort that is involved in tailoring some of the settings which could be made easier."
"The event correlation could be better."
"I would like for this solution to be more cloud-friendly."
"Sometimes, the documentation is a little bit written in Estonia – a country in Europe. The language barrier and translation to English can sometimes make it difficult to understand what they're trying to get at. It's just a language thing."
"The product delivers false positives during reporting because of flapping. Other reasonably priced alternatives may have better performance."
"When using this solution in enterprise monitoring, you are able to see that there are some issues with equipment that could be causing a problem. Sometimes you want to make a root command that you do not want to be executed automatically. What we have tried to do is open an SSH session directly from the solution's interface but it is not possible."
"The solution needs to add remote features."
More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is ranked 41st in Network Monitoring Software with 53 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is rated 8.4, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) writes "We can get a new vendor certified and monitored in our system significantly faster than before". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is most compared with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds Network Device Monitor, Splunk Enterprise Security and IBM Security QRadar, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Nagios XI. See our IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs. Zabbix report.
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