We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NPM and Zabbix based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: In this comparison, Zabbix comes out slightly ahead because it is open-source whereas SolarWinds NPM is not.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Their support team is efficient, and it is easy to set up."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the monitoring capabilities."
"I like SolarWinds support because it's 24/7. You describe your issues, your situation and maybe two or three hours later you can discuss a solution with a technical engineer."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"The product is scalable."
"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."
"It has improved our server performance monitoring overall. We know right away when there are problems. It has built-in statistics, so we can go back and see if there's spiking. We can check what's happening every day around the same time and check the configuration to see if there's something that's running and needs to be fixed."
"Zabbix is very easy to implement."
"Zabbix is both stable and scalable."
"The integration capabilities and APIs are the best part."
"The most valuable feature is service assurance."
"The solution allows you to configure and customize how you want to collect information from servers or other systems."
"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."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"The solution is not always good with new features, so it's take a long time."
"The solution could be more secure."
"We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future."
"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot."
"Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing."
"The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"Zabbix is powerful, but it is difficult to understand initially. There are many things that can be improved, but we might not be using Zabbix to its fullest extent. The software has more features than we need."
"The product could be more secure and more stable."
"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."
"In an upcoming release, there should be automated reports which we are currently doing manually. For example, if we collect a report file every day and want to send it to a moderator for review. We are expecting this feature to come out soon but it would be valuable to have now."
"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 only improvement I would suggest, revolves around its AI and ML capabilities."
"When we have a problem, we have to do a lot of research to solve it."
"There's a small module of APM, however, it is not an enhanced version. People usually ask for a full-fledged APM solution."
SolarWinds NPM is ranked 6th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 147 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 100 reviews. SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". SolarWinds NPM is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes, Entuity and LogicMonitor, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, Nagios Core, Nagios XI and Amazon CloudWatch. See our SolarWinds NPM vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors, and best Network Monitoring Software vendors.
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Hello ,
just to let you know about my modest contribution, indeed its two tools are very practical: The choice of one of the solutions depends on two factors:
- The price and the competence of the system administrators
Zabbix is a free tool and requires a strong Linux, Scripting skill for all that is custom supervision. integration with third-party tools ( Grafana Dashbord , Ticketing Tools ...)
Solarwinds is very intuitive and complete (reporting, view, resources, NOC view) all its features are integrated and easily configurable.
Regards
Arsène