We performed a comparison between Centreon 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: Both solutions received high marks from users. Zabbix has a slight edge over Centreon because it is a free product.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface."
"Another feature we use is Business Activity, which provides us with an end-user perspective when a service is down or isn't working correctly. This is helpful when monitoring the KPIs. When we see a device or server that isn't working, we find the root cause."
"What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, In Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other."
"It supports active monitoring so we don't have to use traps. From time to time traps are not very useful because we never know if they are actually working or not. The reporting part is also valuable as are the event logs. Using them we can check right away if something has had a hiccup."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"We have a single GUI where we can view the status of all our infrastructure."
"The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks."
"E-mail alert notifications are valuable."
"We use it to monitor and manage our servers."
"Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring. Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources."
"The features I found most valuable are the user interface and a wide range of network devices that are easy to configure."
"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."
"It provides high scalability, alerting, notification, templating, and end-to-end security."
"They've already added extra features, such as noise-canceling and facial recognition, which is great."
"There is a problems page that shows us every warning or problem that occurs on our VMs globally. The map screen is also really useful because this is something that was missing. I don't know every other tool in the market. So, I don't know if this is a good point of only Zabbix, or other tools are also doing it, but from my point of view, this is the most useful page that I use, along with the problems page that efficiently lists the problem, recovery time, ending hours, starting hours, and so on."
"The calculations part is the most valuable."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature."
"I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful."
"I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive."
"Improvements I would like to see include a discovery solution, better reports, and end-to-end monitoring."
"The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout."
"I went through a few things with them to do with Centreon MAP, to do with active polygons, being able to draw an area and make that active. The functionality was in the older version of Centreon MAP and in the new version, which was a complete rewrite, they dropped it."
"During the initial setup we faced some issues. Part of it was because we had to become more knowledgeable in the solution. There are some gray areas and if you don't know the product well you may have issues. Another part of it was some bugs that we came across, although that's part of every software solution in IT nowadays. But the initial setup could be easier."
"The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution."
"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 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 would like to better be able to monitor Oracle processes."
"The performance reporting could be improved."
"The solution needs to add remote features."
"I would like to see a more flexible mobile client, and better HA out of the box."
"Zabbix isn't a great tool for cloud-specific monitoring - its connection to public clouds needs to be improved. Other areas for improvement would be the lack of dashboards and integrations."
"Documentation terminology could be improved."
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Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Centreon is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga, Nagios XI and Datadog, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core, Nagios XI and Amazon CloudWatch. See our Centreon vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
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