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 product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"It is a stable solution...Based on the feedback I have received from my colleagues in our company's IT department, the setup phase of the solution is relatively easy."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus for metrics collection and monitoring are its stability, robustness, and rich set of features."
"It is an efficient solution."
"The solution is useful to collect huge metrics."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"It is a scalable solution."
"We use it to monitor and manage our servers."
"The calculations part is the most valuable."
"There are lots of great features and functionality within the solution."
"The implementation process is very straightforward."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"The initial setup, while not simple, is easier than other products."
"The most valuable feature is the support for monitoring Cisco switches."
"The best thing about Zabbix is the integration and the APIs that are included are very fast"
"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
"When it comes to deployment, if you have no experience with something like a CI/CD pipeline, it might be a challenge."
"The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with."
"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"The primary area where Prometheus could be improved is in terms of pricing, particularly when used with managed services."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
"We would like to see the addition of automatic push functionality to this product. This would save time when monitoring our servers and networks as, at present, we have to manually install the Zabbix agent on any hardware to be monitored."
"Its UI should be improved. They did some improvements in version 5, but it could benefit from some more work. Its integrations should also be improved. They've been active for one year, and they seem to have noticed that. It has new integrations, but it could benefit from more integrations. As far as I know, there is no model to push statistics, metrics, or events towards Zabbix. This type of API isn't yet there, whereas some other tools provide an API for this."
"The documentation could be improved."
"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."
"To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial."
"The reports are not great and should be improved."
"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."
"There are a lot of areas for improvement, specifically in the dashboards and reports functionalities."
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 101 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 Splunk Enterprise Security, 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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