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 feature I found most valuable is the number of integrations. It is the industry standard for metrics."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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 dashboard is very valuable."
"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"The pricing of the product is reasonable."
"Templates are good. We download them from the official Zabbix site or the community. If the information we need isn't available, we create custom templates based on client requirements."
"I'm supervising all the IT departments, and Zabbix seems quite good for them. It provides graphics and information in real time. We get alerts about crashes on the system, enabling us to quickly repair issues. We can easily find devices with problems."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system."
"I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP."
"Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product."
"The solution is open-source, easy to manage, and user-friendly making it easy for anyone to use."
"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with."
"When it comes to deployment, if you have no experience with something like a CI/CD pipeline, it might be a challenge."
"Prometheus' UI color can improve. Using the Prometheus UI for configuration or analyzing queries is a horrible experience."
"The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The primary area where Prometheus could be improved is in terms of pricing, particularly when used with managed services."
"If you want to collect details of metrics, you should be able to write a query for it directly. I want the product to offer better queries for the metrics."
"We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes."
"Zabbix does not draw automatic mapping of the network, this is something they should add in the future. There is a lot of effort that is involved in tailoring some of the settings which could be made easier."
"Implementing Zabbix is difficult. I've deployed many solutions over the years, and Zabbix is the hardest to implement. You have to do some development to get it to work with IBM, Micro Focus, or HP products."
"The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes."
"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."
"Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue."
"Zabbix could improve when it comes to large-scale use cases. Additionally, the inventory could be better when connecting to other solutions, such as ServiceNow. There show to be better integration with other platforms and storage."
"I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability."
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 100 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 AWS X-Ray, 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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