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 However, users have raised concerns about the outdated interface, lack of detailed documentation, and limited customizability of alerts.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Room for Improvement: Nagios XI users have cited outdated interface, lack of detailed documentation, limited customizability of alerts, and high cost as areas needing improvement.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."
"It's a monitoring agent. It's designed to do one thing. Its most valuable feature is its monitoring."
"The solution has a lot of plugins and scripts integrated with it."
"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."
"It's great for monitoring IT services infrastructure."
"Nagios allows us to configure any device so that we can send pager alerts when people don't have access to emails. It also allows us to schedule downtime and maintenance."
"I can monitor a software made in-house to software of bigger companies."
"The solution is pretty stable."
"Nagios is a custom API manager, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature."
"Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues."
"I like being able to use proxy servers for different locations. The agents are pretty cool. They're easy to roll out. The standard out-of-the-box templates are also pretty easy to use. The integration with other learning products is also good. I have, in the past, used Slack, but we've integrated it with Microsoft Teams. We also use it for SMS with a service called Redcoat. It is very flexible. It does what I need it to do, and my manager is very happy because it doesn't cost anything. We are nearing 4,000 hosts inside Zabbix, and we've got another 6,000 access points to add to it. We've thrown everything at it, and it has managed to keep going. I am very impressed with the tool, and I'd shake their hand very hard if I got to say the compliments to the Zabbix team. They keep improving it and doing refreshes, which is one good thing about it. There is also online information as well as books that you can purchase if you're willing to read enough. There is a lot to pick up, but it is a pretty complete solution."
"Zabbix helps to save time."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is monitoring."
"The basic setup is very easy."
"Zabbix is scalable."
"Dashboard and the customization of the items and triggers are the most valuable features."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The interface could be more user-friendly."
"They need more documentation for the plugins."
"Nagios XI can improve network and hardware monitoring, these parameters should be simplified to allow usage for monitoring. Additionally, if there was automatic reporting it would be helpful."
"Technical support is an area that needs improvement. It is not available 24/7."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"I would like to see more customization in the network map because it is a bit tricky to use it."
"We often need to develop custom plugins to get Nagios to work the way we want it to work because the features we need are not always available in Nagios."
"The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them."
"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."
"The server monitoring could be better."
"Zabbix isn't a great tool for cloud-specific monitoring - its connection to public clouds needs to be improved. Other areas for improvement would be the lack of dashboards and integrations."
"One of the things we don't like is that Zabbix has a license structure with a price that is high compared to the competition. It's very high, for example, compared to something like Microsoft Teams."
"The GUI could be more intuitive. Also, we'd like streaming telemetry. Zabbix might have this feature, but I haven't seen it yet. It took us a long time to get started because the documentation isn't very descriptive. We had to go through various sources like YouTube and forums to get this solution working."
"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."
"The user interface could be better."
"The documentation gets a bit messy between versions and is not too detailed, which is a bit painful for first-timers, especially when they run into issues."
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