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 solution is useful to collect huge metrics."
"The most valuable feature is that we can receive information in different formats."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus are the many functions available. The functions are helpful for understanding the behavior of applications and infrastructure."
"Prometheus provides a flexible and adjustable querying and describing time, allowing for more responsive monitoring."
"It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"It lets me proactively identify and resolve system issues. This, in terms of, most of the time, really reduces downtime. Because when there are notifications on time when we engage it quickly on time, our downtime is highly reduced. So basically, Prometheus is for monitoring and alerting."
"The most valuable feature is monitoring."
"We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"SNMP monitoring, source discovery, and alert triggering are most valuable."
"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."
"Setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two or three months."
"Zabbix is an excellent performance monitoring tool."
"Zabbix is very easy to implement."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"The alert functionality is kind of lackluster."
"There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them."
"The interface is not particularly user-friendly and that could be improved."
"The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with."
"The System Center Operations Manager can be improved."
"Zabbix is powerful, but it is difficult to understand initially. There are many things that can be improved, but we might not be using Zabbix to its fullest extent. The software has more features than we need."
"If Zabbix had a better dashboard then it would be nice."
"I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability."
"It should be easy to modify the front end."
"We would like to monitor other touchpoints such as ATM machines. It would be great if it can provide monitoring of ATM machines. Compatibility with other products would also be great."
"An area for improvement would be the ease of doing aggregation from the value or different devices."
"The only improvement I would suggest, revolves around its AI and ML capabilities."
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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