We compared Zabbix and Amazon CloudWatch across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: Zabbix's setup can vary in ease and complexity, requiring technical expertise and knowledge of Linux and programming. However, it offers extensive features, customization options, and a free open-source version. On the other hand, Amazon CloudWatch has an easy and straightforward setup process, user-friendly interface, and good technical support. It is highly valued for its simplicity, stability, scalability, and integration with other AWS services. However, it has limitations in monitoring application performance and generating reports. Pricing-wise, Zabbix is free and open-source, while CloudWatch's pricing is considered reasonable.
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud, but also for some of our on-premises resources."
"The solution offers very detailed metrics for their services."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI."
"You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap and easy-to-use solution."
"It has improved our server performance monitoring overall. We know right away when there are problems. It has built-in statistics, so we can go back and see if there's spiking. We can check what's happening every day around the same time and check the configuration to see if there's something that's running and needs to be fixed."
"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."
"We have found that Zabbix is more easy to use than other applications."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"Every new asset placed in the environment can be automatically detected, predicting human failures."
"There is less computing power needed for scaling."
"We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
"The technical support must be improved."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."
"I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"Outside of the normal standard monitoring, I would like to extend patching, importing patching, and supporting patching for Windows Servers."
"My company wanted to do an exercise command to access IT from Cameroon. They wanted to access an FSS to a second host with second equipment that was on another coast but it is not possible on Zabbix to do it. They want to directly access from the front-end of Zabbix to access a prompt in Zabbix to an access terminal. In the front-end, there is no way to do that. That would be an important improvement."
"Its UI needs to be improved a little bit more so that an end-user is also able to handle it. I can handle it, but others should also be able to handle it in a better way. It becomes complex when we are growing and need to add proxies. We need more scalability features and documentation for different use cases. A lot of articles are available, but they need to be in proper documentation. For example, when you have thousands of servers that have to be monitored in different regions of the world, there should be some kind of documentation to describe how you can create proxies and add them. Sometimes, when you are using the database, it can get overloaded. When the network is growing, the number of transactions becomes very high, and the database gets overloaded. There should be information about how to reduce the load on the MySQL database, which is what Zabbix is using. The market is growing a lot, and it should be enhanced for a lot more things. We are currently bringing enhancements at our end for different use cases. For example, when dockerization is going on, how can we check the logs inside the Dockers. We should also be able to monitor and check the number of logins and add features such as SSO login and two-factor authentication as a protocol. These are the security features and concerns that we have to deal with. Currently, we are developing modules to add features to Zabbix, but they should also work on these features."
"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."
"To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial."
"The user web interface is a little bit too basic, we need to link Zabbix to Grafana to have more options, such as graphs and charts. The interface needs to be improved. Additionally, there could be better integration with Grafana API."
"The main problem with Zabbix is that you have to spend time writing templates for all of the products that you have."
"Zabbix technical support is sold separately."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 9th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 40 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace, SolarWinds NPM and Nagios XI, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and SCOM. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Zabbix report.
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