We compared New Relic and Zabbix across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: New Relic offers reliable monitoring capabilities and advanced traceability features. Zabbix is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and reliable performance. It provides customizable dashboards, trigger dependencies, SNMP monitoring, and problem tracking.
Room for Improvement: New Relic could improve by simplifying server removal and offering more detailed troubleshooting information. Reviewers also said the user experience could be smoother and that the documentation should be more detailed. Zabbix could reduce false positives and improve integration, cloud monitoring, and reporting.
Service and Support: Some New Relic customers commended the prompt and knowledgeable support, while others expressed dissatisfaction with slow response times and delayed resolutions. Users had mixed opinions about Zabbix customer service. Some found it helpful, while others feel it needs improvement. Customers generally rely on online documentation and community forums for assistance.
Ease of Deployment: New Relic's setup is perceived as relatively easy, and professional services are available if needed. The complexity of Zabbix's initial setup varies, and it may require an experienced group of administrators and engineers.
Pricing: New Relic's pricing is considered a pain point for many customers, but others said it is reasonable for the features provided. There are additional costs for extra features and historical information. Zabbix is a free, open-source solution, but users can purchase support services and additional features.
ROI: Some New Relic users reported a positive return on investment, but others were uncertain or have not observed any ROI. Users say that Zabbix provides a cost-effective solution.
Comparison Results: New Relic is praised for its robust monitoring capabilities, stellar customer service, and painless setup, but some users say the solution is too pricey and that the user experience could be better. Zabbix is a highly customizable open-source solution with a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including the ability to monitor virtual machines and databases. However, Zabbix’s setup can be complex and may require technical expertise.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The integration and configuration of New Relic is straightforward and easy."
"It offers helpful user metrics so we can learn more about the user experience."
"The most valuable features are the dashboards and tracing."
"The deep insights, which will give you the metrics (not a high level), so we can build out at the database level where the bottleneck is. This has been pretty helpful."
"We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"It has prevented failures from occurring in our production environment."
"Server uptime is its most valuable feature."
"Simple network monitoring that is easy to install and manage."
"The most valuable features in Zabbix are those that help us overcome bottlenecks in CPU usage, as well as reduce memory delay. I know that we have only reached the tip of the iceberg of what Zabbix's features can do for us, and we have not used all of them yet."
"The most valuable feature is the protocol to manage anything."
"I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP."
"It's a very reliable platform and we've never had any issues regarding the scalability or the stability of Zabbix."
"Our customers also like that they don't have to use multiple modules. Micro Focus and major vendors typically require you to buy several modules and plugins. Our customers do not like that. We offer them a single product for all their monitoring needs."
"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 implementation process is very straightforward."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The UX/UI design of New Relic APM could be improved. The solution currently has some slow pages in terms of loading and viewing the pages, for example, the reports. The reports and other pages take a long time to load."
"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."
"New Relic needs to improve is the user data schema."
"It is very difficult to award the service level cycles at an endpoint level."
"New Relic APM can improve the information when we dig deeper to check a problem. There should be more detailed information provided."
"Documentation could be improved in New Relic APM, so users would have more clarity on configuring the dashboard. If New Relic gave better guidelines, users would find it easier to understand the metrics and features of New Relic APM. Another area for improvement is integration with Kubernetes. Currently, the process isn't user-friendly. It's challenging and lacks documentation for users to understand how to integrate New Relic APM with Kubernetes quickly. With multiple levels of Kubernetes dockers and other DBs on different clouds, it's tricky to gather all into New Relic APM on a single dashboard. What I'd like to see in the next version of New Relic APM is a single dashboard where you can easily view which applications fall under specific APMs. If there's a search feature where you can type in a keyword to find out if an APM is related to a particular application, that would be great."
"New Relic does enable frontend performance monitoring by default. However, when we are troubleshooting the issue, New Relic is not able to trace back to the service where the issue is. Other solutions, such as Dynatrace are better."
"The initial setup can be made easier. Like Mixpanel, New Relic can also have a step-by-step guide for the setup process."
"The user web interface is a little bit too basic, we need to link Zabbix to Grafana to have more options, such as graphs and charts. The interface needs to be improved. Additionally, there could be better integration with Grafana API."
"The product delivers false positives during reporting because of flapping. Other reasonably priced alternatives may have better performance."
"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."
"I am having difficulties connecting it to Grafana, as well as some of the other plugins like Kibana."
"Improvement is needed as per customer requirements."
"The user interface could be better."
"There are areas of improvement. The database grows really fast. So, when you install Zabbix, you have to deal with some issues, like the database. We become pretty big very fast."
"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."
New Relic is ranked 6th in Network Monitoring Software with 152 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. New Relic is rated 8.6, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of New Relic writes "Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, Elastic Observability, Grafana and Instana Dynamic APM, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Nagios XI. See our New Relic vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors, and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.
We monitor all Network Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
(1) Can we design the Zabbix dashboard to look like New Relic’s rich dashboard?
You’d have to develop an agent that plugs into New Relic to get all their data 1st and then a dashboard to assimilate both as Big Panda has already done.
(2) Can we see all New Relic features with Zabbix, like End-to-end Web transaction analysis, Database Transaction analysis and reports on usability and error rate?
Not without significant development work. Zabbix does not have application (function-level) monitoring for the End-trend Web transaction analysis and Database Transaction analysis. Zabbix does externals like disk usage, CPU percentages, database statistics, etc. So, again, you’d have to develop and agent that plugs into New Relice to get all their data 1st and then the analysis tools provided by New Relic.
(3) How much development/customization effort is required to introduce the above features with Zabbix?
Significant.
(4) Does anyone have a comparison of features offered by New Relic and Zabbix?
New Relic has both the application (function-level) monitoring for the End-trend Web transaction analysis and Database Transaction analysis as well as all the external device/system monitoring statics of Zabbix. Again, for an integrated solution, it would probably be cheaper to use a product like BigPanda than to redevelop an untried in-house solution which could take 12 months to evolve a subset of the functionality.
From looking briefly over Zabbix I noticed that it's on-prem system that requires attention. It didn't seem like an easy to use system either. Although, I am not experienced enough to make those claims. New Relic is a SaaS solution, ideal for large organizations. The time it takes to create dashboards is fairly short and learning curve was minimal. They use NRql language to make system calls based on cached data in the cloud. Metrix are kept off-prem and can be traced back a year, depending on the retention subscription. Deployment is easy, consists of two agents, APM and server agent, second is free for all. In any case, putting aside that NR is one of top 3 on Gartner's magic quadrant, it is easy to use/maintain and create all kinds of dashboards.
I can agree with Carlos. The question is - what do you need? We use saymon.info to cover different systems with a common UI with drill-downs & schemas.
1) As far as I know no. The main question here is Zabbix continuous monitoring is far from NR Higher OSI layer capabilities, the graphical feeling can be emulated -agreed- but the drill-down functionality NR offers is far from any Open Source monitoring program I've seen. Sorry for that, NR is worth in some aspects.
2) Yes, NR can be exported to a Hadoop DB and exploded using BI or Zabbix sources, of course NR tries you to do exactly the opposite ..
3) A lot
4) Not me, basically they do different things , from my point of view Zabbix is a layer below New Relic. We face HW monitoring with NR wasn't usable as we had our servers dinamically managed in the cloud, so they are created and destroyed, this made NR Server monitoring to create each instance with the results of having hundreds of non-existing servers. We decided to monitor servers with the cloud apps (MS... and Zabbix) and app performance with NR.