We compared Nagios XI and Zabbix based on our users' reviews across several parameters. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Nagios XI is praised for its ease of deployment, real-time monitoring capabilities, and comprehensive reporting features. However, users have raised concerns about the outdated interface, lack of detailed documentation, and limited customizability of alerts. Zabbix is lauded for its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, customizable alerting system, user-friendly interface, and responsive customer service. Users appreciate the value of their investment and reasonable pricing of Zabbix, though some have suggested improvements in the user interface, documentation, and scalability.
Features: Nagios XI boasts ease of monitoring multiple systems and customizable alerts. Zabbix excels in comprehensive monitoring, user-friendly interface, and extensive reporting. Nagios XI emphasizes integration capabilities. Zabbix focuses on monitoring various system aspects.
Pricing and ROI: Nagios XI has a minimal setup cost, while Zabbix has no setup costs. Nagios XI offers transparent pricing and value for investment, while Zabbix users find the pricing reasonable and the licensing flexible. Both are considered competitive options in terms of cost., Nagios XI users noticed improved productivity, efficiency, and system visibility with quick issue resolution and cost savings. Customizable alerts prevented downtime, ensuring smooth operations. Zabbix users reported positive outcomes, proving to be a valuable investment for their organization.
Room for Improvement: Nagios XI users have cited outdated interface, lack of detailed documentation, limited customizability of alerts, and high cost as areas needing improvement. Zabbix users suggest enhancing user interface, providing better documentation, improving scalability, and performance.
Deployment and customer support: Nagios XI has a range of deployment options with different complexity levels. Zabbix's setup can vary in difficulty and may require clear documentation and customization for success. Deployment durations for Nagios XI range from 30 minutes to a few months, while for Zabbix, it can take hours to weeks. Customers of Nagios XI appreciate the efficient technical support provided, though there are occasional delays in being connected to the appropriate representative. Zabbix users favor self-help resources such as manuals and community forums.
The summary above is based on 54 interviews we conducted recently with Nagios XI and Zabbix users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Nagios is a custom API manager, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature."
"Nagios XI is a simple monitoring tool with performance management."
"The most valuable feature of Nagios XI is customization. We can customize based on our requirements. We can do modifications and implement a lot of scripts. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"It's a monitoring agent. It's designed to do one thing. Its most valuable feature is its monitoring."
"Since this is an open source technology, if we are capable of writing the plugins in any scripting language, this product allows us to monitor anything we want."
"It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"Nagios XI helps us monitor the bandwidth of the internet connection, HTTP, DNS, active directory services, and exchange data availability. We have multiple servers to monitor databases, availability of servers, and ping."
"I can monitor a software made in-house to software of bigger companies."
"It's a flexible solution."
"We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes."
"They've already added extra features, such as noise-canceling and facial recognition, which is great."
"Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues."
"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."
"Zabbix helps to save time."
"The solution is quite mature and very stable."
"The most valuable feature is the support for monitoring Cisco switches."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"It can be quite difficult to know which drivers and agents to use when setting up."
"It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure."
"The Configuration Wizard needs improvement, because not all vendors are present."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"The product's stability could be even better."
"The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect."
"The installation and monitoring need improvement."
"The interface could be more user-friendly."
"I think the reporting part of Zabbix can be improved in terms of more user-friendly graphics to display the collected data. Many simple users who don't know how to use Zabbix properly might get confused by the reporting, although at the same time it is very versatile for my company."
"There are some features of Zabbix that are not good for reporting. The DX Spectrum solution has better reporting."
"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."
"It could be more stable."
"The performance reporting could be improved."
"Even though it’s such a powerful monitoring system, it would be more helpful if it had a flexible UI."
"The main problem with Zabbix is that you have to spend time writing templates for all of the products that you have."
"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."
Nagios XI is ranked 10th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 54 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 98 reviews. Nagios XI is rated 8.2, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Nagios XI is most compared with Nagios Core, PRTG Network Monitor, Wireshark, Icinga and SCOM, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Amazon CloudWatch. See our Nagios XI vs. Zabbix report.
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ZABBIX ... of course :)
We are working with this wonderful monitoring tool since 2008
ZABBIX ... of course :)
We have been working with this wonderful monitoring tool since 2007 (before we had used Nagios, Openview, Whatsup, Hobbitmon, etc) and until now we haven't seen any limitations in our projects.
If you need to learn a little bit more about 'how to customize ZABBIX' you can search about:
- ZABBIX UserParameters;
- ZABBIX pluggable modules;
- ZABBIX LLD;
- ZABBIX API;
I think this things will help a lot to know how to extend/customize ZABBIX.
Luciano