We compared New Relic and Zabbix across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: New Relic offers reliable monitoring capabilities and advanced traceability features. 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: New Relic could improve by simplifying server removal and offering more detailed troubleshooting information. Reviewers also said the user experience could be smoother and that the documentation should be more detailed. Zabbix could reduce false positives and improve integration, cloud monitoring, and reporting.
Service and Support: Some New Relic customers commended the prompt and knowledgeable support, while others expressed dissatisfaction with slow response times and delayed resolutions. 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: New Relic's setup is perceived as relatively easy, and professional services are available if needed. The complexity of Zabbix's initial setup varies, and it may require an experienced group of administrators and engineers.
Pricing: New Relic's pricing is considered a pain point for many customers, but others said it is reasonable for the features provided. There are additional costs for extra features and historical information. Zabbix is a free, open-source solution, but users can purchase support services and additional features.
ROI: Some New Relic users reported a positive return on investment, but others were uncertain or have not observed any ROI. Users say that Zabbix provides a cost-effective solution.
Comparison Results: New Relic is praised for its robust monitoring capabilities, stellar customer service, and painless setup, but some users say the solution is too pricey and that the user experience could be better. 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.
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"They instrument up from the bottom to the top – every piece of code - they have a very perfect read of what’s being done, and how long it’s taking."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."
"End-user Synthetics and monitoring are very good."
"The breakdown of the response time of different components and getting in-depth details of the slow component are the most valuable features. It is easy to use, and it gets the job done."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"It has prevented failures from occurring in our production environment."
"It has helped my organization to dive deeper into the application using the APM module is very helpful."
"The service maps that it creates, the health maps that it creates, the insights that it provides, etc., are all quite useful."
"The solution is stable."
"Every new asset placed in the environment can be automatically detected, predicting human failures."
"Health and communication links availability."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the ease with which we can set it up at customer sites with our custom Zabbix proxy and tools."
"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."
"It provides high scalability, alerting, notification, templating, and end-to-end security."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system."
"I like being able to use proxy servers for different locations. The agents are pretty cool. They're easy to roll out. The standard out-of-the-box templates are also pretty easy to use. The integration with other learning products is also good. I have, in the past, used Slack, but we've integrated it with Microsoft Teams. We also use it for SMS with a service called Redcoat. It is very flexible. It does what I need it to do, and my manager is very happy because it doesn't cost anything. We are nearing 4,000 hosts inside Zabbix, and we've got another 6,000 access points to add to it. We've thrown everything at it, and it has managed to keep going. I am very impressed with the tool, and I'd shake their hand very hard if I got to say the compliments to the Zabbix team. They keep improving it and doing refreshes, which is one good thing about it. There is also online information as well as books that you can purchase if you're willing to read enough. There is a lot to pick up, but it is a pretty complete solution."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I would like an infrastructure network that provides real-time views, showing the issues."
"One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability."
"In the next release, I'd like to see a better pricing structure."
"The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment needs improvement on the filtering part. I would like it to go more granular on accounts."
"New Relic needs to improve is the user data schema."
"Documentation is one of the biggest things that I have a problem with since its documentation is not clear sometimes."
"Real-user monitoring would be helpful as it would help me to really understand the client-side performance of the application."
"The APIs could be better. I would also like more APIs and features to integrate with streaming solutions, like Kinesis or Kafka."
"I would like for this solution to be more cloud-friendly."
"They should open an SSH session from the web interface."
"Improvement is needed as per customer requirements."
"To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial."
"We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes."
"The server monitoring could be better."
"The only improvement I would suggest, revolves around its AI and ML capabilities."
"The APM monitoring has room for improvement, although I hear that the new 5.2 version has some improvements in that area, and I'd like to give that a go. I would like to see a few more templates out there for different styles of monitoring. I use the Grafana interface for reporting. I would also like it to have an out-of-the-box ability to email reports. You can create reports, but to be able to email those reports would be really helpful. I've got users who are not interested in logging in and generating a report. They want it all pre-canned and sent to an email address. It would also be really handy if we could pin certain reports up onto platforms such as Teams or SharePoint. A GUI for the proxy server would be cool to have for debugging purposes and for the support teams to have a look at, but I don't know whether that's really feasible to do. I get enough from the log files themselves."
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New Relic is ranked 6th in Network Monitoring Software with 152 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. New Relic is rated 8.6, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of New Relic writes "Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, Elastic Observability, Grafana and Instana Dynamic APM, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Nagios XI. See our New Relic vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors, and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.
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(1) Can we design the Zabbix dashboard to look like New Relic’s rich dashboard?
You’d have to develop an agent that plugs into New Relic to get all their data 1st and then a dashboard to assimilate both as Big Panda has already done.
(2) Can we see all New Relic features with Zabbix, like End-to-end Web transaction analysis, Database Transaction analysis and reports on usability and error rate?
Not without significant development work. Zabbix does not have application (function-level) monitoring for the End-trend Web transaction analysis and Database Transaction analysis. Zabbix does externals like disk usage, CPU percentages, database statistics, etc. So, again, you’d have to develop and agent that plugs into New Relice to get all their data 1st and then the analysis tools provided by New Relic.
(3) How much development/customization effort is required to introduce the above features with Zabbix?
Significant.
(4) Does anyone have a comparison of features offered by New Relic and Zabbix?
New Relic has both the application (function-level) monitoring for the End-trend Web transaction analysis and Database Transaction analysis as well as all the external device/system monitoring statics of Zabbix. Again, for an integrated solution, it would probably be cheaper to use a product like BigPanda than to redevelop an untried in-house solution which could take 12 months to evolve a subset of the functionality.
From looking briefly over Zabbix I noticed that it's on-prem system that requires attention. It didn't seem like an easy to use system either. Although, I am not experienced enough to make those claims. New Relic is a SaaS solution, ideal for large organizations. The time it takes to create dashboards is fairly short and learning curve was minimal. They use NRql language to make system calls based on cached data in the cloud. Metrix are kept off-prem and can be traced back a year, depending on the retention subscription. Deployment is easy, consists of two agents, APM and server agent, second is free for all. In any case, putting aside that NR is one of top 3 on Gartner's magic quadrant, it is easy to use/maintain and create all kinds of dashboards.
I can agree with Carlos. The question is - what do you need? We use saymon.info to cover different systems with a common UI with drill-downs & schemas.
1) As far as I know no. The main question here is Zabbix continuous monitoring is far from NR Higher OSI layer capabilities, the graphical feeling can be emulated -agreed- but the drill-down functionality NR offers is far from any Open Source monitoring program I've seen. Sorry for that, NR is worth in some aspects.
2) Yes, NR can be exported to a Hadoop DB and exploded using BI or Zabbix sources, of course NR tries you to do exactly the opposite ..
3) A lot
4) Not me, basically they do different things , from my point of view Zabbix is a layer below New Relic. We face HW monitoring with NR wasn't usable as we had our servers dinamically managed in the cloud, so they are created and destroyed, this made NR Server monitoring to create each instance with the results of having hundreds of non-existing servers. We decided to monitor servers with the cloud apps (MS... and Zabbix) and app performance with NR.