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 However, users have raised concerns about the outdated interface, lack of detailed documentation, and limited customizability of alerts.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Room for Improvement: Nagios XI users have cited outdated interface, lack of detailed documentation, limited customizability of alerts, and high cost as areas needing improvement.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 is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"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."
"The installation is no problem. I've installed Nagios several times."
"I can monitor a phone on a desk to very big servers of any company."
"Though I downplayed the administrative NCC GUI, this is by far the strongest aspect of the Nagios XI product."
"The most useful aspect of this solution is the ability to customize it for the client agent."
"Nagios XI is stable."
"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 has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system."
"The most valuable feature is the protocol to manage anything."
"The solution is open-source, easy to manage, and user-friendly making it easy for anyone to use."
"The solution is stable."
"Zabbix is scalable."
"There are lots of great features and functionality within the solution."
"The most valuable feature is monitoring."
"The initial setup, while not simple, is easier than other products."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"It can be quite difficult to know which drivers and agents to use when setting up."
"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 scalability of Nagios XI is scalable. However, it is not easy to do."
"I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space."
"I would like to be able to extend it to all of our data centers, whether they are in the cloud or not. It would be helpful if I could connect everywhere."
"The product uses the backend as Perl and could be modified to a more lightweight solution like what's being offered by other vendors."
"The installation and monitoring need improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The server monitoring could be better."
"Having a more customizable interface and dashboard would be an improvement."
"Zabbix claims that there is an auto-discovery process but my team member was facing difficulty and was told that it's not really automatic, and there are some manual steps."
"It would be helpful if they translated the documentation to Cyrillic languages."
"For us, the initial setup was complex"
"Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."
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, Icinga, Wireshark 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