We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Zabbix based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"We use it to monitor and manage our servers."
"The basic setup is very easy."
"Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring. Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources."
"The features I found most valuable are the user interface and a wide range of network devices that are easy to configure."
"The initial setup, while not simple, is easier than other products."
"Setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two or three months."
"I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP."
"The flexible licensing model is one of the solution's most valuable aspects. It really allows for great flexibility for companies."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"Zabbix isn't very good at automation just yet."
"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."
"There are not too much documentation or manuals. We found the tutorials very easy to understand but do not go deep enough in the use of Zabbix. We need more manuals, proper use, documentation, etc."
"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."
"Its UI should be improved. They did some improvements in version 5, but it could benefit from some more work. Its integrations should also be improved. They've been active for one year, and they seem to have noticed that. It has new integrations, but it could benefit from more integrations. As far as I know, there is no model to push statistics, metrics, or events towards Zabbix. This type of API isn't yet there, whereas some other tools provide an API for this."
"If Zabbix had a better dashboard then it would be nice."
"We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes."
"Zabbix technical support is sold separately."
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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 10th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 101 reviews. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and Nagios XI, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, Nagios Core, Amazon CloudWatch and SolarWinds NPM. See our SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Server Monitoring vendors.
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