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 most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features."
"Prometheus provides a flexible and adjustable querying and describing time, allowing for more responsive monitoring."
"I like its lightweight configuration functions."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"Zabbix is both stable and scalable."
"We value the auto-host discovery, template import, bulk import/export features. Newer versions also add nice features, such as multi-IP per host."
"Zabbix is very easy to implement."
"Health and communication links availability."
"The best thing about Zabbix is the integration and the APIs that are included are very fast"
"Dashboard and the customization of the items and triggers are the most valuable features."
"We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes."
"The calculations part is the most valuable."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"There isn’t much clarity regarding the issues that happen at the server end. It is a push model and from the client’s point of view, it needs to look better and solve remote issues."
"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."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"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."
"Documentation terminology could be improved."
"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."
"In the next release, I'm hoping for features targeted towards larger users with more customizable options. Despite this, I think pre-canned reports that can be used straight out of the box would be beneficial rather than having to configure each report individually. Additionally, a deeper dive into software configurations on the machines would be useful, although I understand there may be challenges in implementing this due to scripting requirements. More documentation would also be appreciated."
"Zabbix isn't very good at automation just yet."
"The user interface could be a bit better. They could update it a bit."
"Zabbix could improve when it comes to large-scale use cases. Additionally, the inventory could be better when connecting to other solutions, such as ServiceNow. There show to be better integration with other platforms and storage."
"To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial."
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 101 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 Splunk Enterprise Security, 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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