Nagios Core and Zabbix are open-source IT infrastructure monitoring solutions. Nagios Core is a mature solution that focuses on flexibility in customization, timely alerts, centralized dashboards, and plugin support for versatile monitoring solutions. Zabbix offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities, customizable alerting, user-friendly interface, and extensive reporting.
Comparing the features of Nagios Core and Zabbix:
Pricing and ROI: Nagios Core and Zabbix are free and open-source. Zabbix's user-friendly interface and web configuration might reduce setup and maintenance costs for some. Conversely, Nagios Core's large community and extensive plugin library could minimize the need for paid support. Ultimately, ROI depends on your technical expertise.
Room for Improvement: Nagios Core reviews highlight the need for a more modern UI and easier configuration options. Zabbix reviewers mention occasional scalability limitations for extremely large deployments.
Customer Support: With an open-source model, both rely on community support forums for free assistance. Paid support options are available for Nagios XI and Zabbix enterprise versions, offering faster response times and dedicated help. Reviews suggest a slight edge for Zabbix's community support due to its larger user base.
Deployment: Zabbix offers a more straightforward installation process with a web-based interface for configuration. Nagios Core requires manual configuration through text files, although a web interface is available with the paid Nagios XI version. Both have good documentation, but Zabbix's web interface might be easier for beginners.
The summary above is based on 58 interviews we conducted recently with Zabbix and Nagios Core users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"The notifications are definitely one of the most valuable features of Nagios Core. We know what to look for and what to expect when things are down."
"I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring."
"It has made the life of the network operations staff more proactive in managing the resources of the infrastructure. It prevents disasters long before they can take place."
"Our customers like that Nagios Core is an open source solution. It can be customized to our customers' specific needs."
"What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services."
"Dashboard provides monitor of total assets."
"Other products are good but from the configuration point of view Nagios is really very lightweight. The price is really good in my opinion. Another important thing is that my Nagios engine still works with Dual core 8GB ram for the last 10 years."
"Alert calls occur anytime a service goes down or a matrix is difficult and that helps us to quickly restore service and transfer work."
"The most valuable feature is the alert and alarm monitoring."
"I have found that the reporting feature in Zabbix is most valuable. Additionally, the solution has given us bandwidth options, we are able to see where problems are. For example, we noticed a problem that occurred because of a bad interface going in the wireless VLAN."
"We detect problems before the customer does and before it actually happens using the predictive functions in Zabbix."
"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."
"We use Zabbix to monitor our organization's IT infrastructure and workstations. We don't use Microsoft Intune since it's expensive. The tool's real-time alerting system has proved crucial for us, particularly when a new device joins a network that is not one of our own devices. It notifies us about the presence of this new device, allowing us to investigate further. Additionally, it alerts us about disk usage, memory usage, and the software installed on the machine."
"Every new asset placed in the environment can be automatically detected, predicting human failures."
"The most valuable feature is the support for monitoring Cisco switches."
"Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"Making it a little easier to configure and set up from the start would help. There are multiple layers that you have to wade through to be able to set it up, to do it the right way, and to get it to do what you want it to do."
"I believe Nagios Core will need to provide an option for big data platforms in the future."
"It's not that easy to install the product itself. Also, the UI is a bit hard for regular users to navigate through."
"Nagios Core is limited in terms of distributed setups, and there is no central view for remote data centers."
"The scalability needs improvement, it's not scalable at this time."
"Nagios Core could improve by adding a user interface. If you want the user interface you have to use Nagios XI."
"Nagios Core can improve the graphical interface, it would make things a little easier."
"Bandwidth monitoring is the pain point for me because Nagios Core does not monitor bandwidth effectively like Cacti does."
"We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes."
"The reporting features need improvement, especially detailed inventory reporting. Since it's freeware, reporting may not be a major focus."
"Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue."
"The product delivers false positives during reporting because of flapping. Other reasonably priced alternatives may have better performance."
"As far as improvements, sometimes I get a bit frustrated when I move from a previous version to a new one because some configuration has changed—I need to investigate the documentation to deal with some configuration. But it doesn't take much time, so it's okay."
"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 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."
"The integration of the product is not so easy, especially when it comes to the application database."
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Nagios Core is ranked 7th in Network Monitoring Software with 46 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. Nagios Core is rated 8.0, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Nagios Core writes "An Open Source Fully Featured Data Centre Monitoring Tool". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Nagios Core is most compared with Nagios XI, Icinga, Centreon, OP5 Monitor and LogicMonitor, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios XI and Amazon CloudWatch. See our Nagios Core vs. Zabbix report.
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