Share your experience using Microsoft Network Monitor

We needed a tool to know what the space inside of the infrastructure is like. My work was to use Zabbix to get information about the IT infrastructure in the village or in the towns that are very far from the headquarters. I had to use Zabbix to provide information with maps that the IT was working and so that the headquarters can see in real-time what the healyh of the IT infrastructure we had deployed in the electrical network is.

After this experience, I tried Zabbix in african organization based in my country and it was used to monitor the IT infrastructures in three countries, cameroon, benin and ivory coast. For the moment, Zabbix is not yet very popular here but I really appreciate it and really want to make people know that it's very simple to use. 

In 2023 i tried Zabbix 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9. And news features like pdf report have improved my Admin Sys routine.

Zabbix has improved the daily monitoring tasks by making them easier and faster.

The feature that I find most valuable is the stateful map. In fact, the Zabbix map designing tools permit to make monitoring stateful maps with topologies similar to the reals IT network maps.

My company wanted to do an exercise command to access IT from Cameroon. They wanted to access an FSS to a second host with second equipment that was on another coast but it is not possible on Zabbix to do it. They want to directly access from the front-end of Zabbix to access a prompt in Zabbix to an access terminal. In the front-end, there is no way to do that. That would be an important improvement. 

II have been using this product for seven years.

It is very scalable because I tried version 5. I used 5 from 0 and I see that they have improved many things, but there is not yet this option to have an access terminal where you have many functionalities. 

The scalability works fine because the community is very active. When a new version comes out, we can see that they have tried to add.

The technical support is very quick. When I have a problem and I post it in the community, they answer me very quickly. For now, i don't need any technical support. 

Positive

In fact, even if I have looked at Nagios first, before Zabbix I did not really use it or any other monitoring solution.

The initial setup was very quick. The first time it was long because I didn't know it yet. I was only using Windows. The first time was very difficult because of the operating system. 

I implement Zabbix in-house with as outsourcing offficials webs tutorials

Zabbix exploitation has dispensed with financing frequent visits to the technical area through alerts, notifications, and stateful maps. Thus, the return on investment is more than 100%.

Zabbix is an effective cheaper network monitoring solution because it doesn't need any ongoing cost due to licensing.

Before choosing Zabbix, we evaluated Nagios but we were not comfortable with notifications messages syntax and configurations.

I would recommend Zabbix to people who want to monitor a simple network.

I have found that the literature on the website is not very easy for some people. They want to be in those to read more about Zabbix, how to install it, and what the normal problems are.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

My main use case for New Relic is to monitor application health on a daily basis. Starting with my day, I go to the dashboards to check how the application health is and any alerts already triggered for the application, whether it concerns disk, memory, CPU, or how the applications are running. Recently, we had a slow query running for the application, which was really the bottleneck as it took a long time for the application to respond, and we found it out by using New Relic to identify the slow query, which really helped me.

To troubleshoot and resolve the slow query issue once New Relic points it out, I generally go to the Application Performance Monitoring, which is APM, and then I check in APM for the query where there are different tabs, including one for the database. After that, I go and check the database, which shows what query is taking how much time. Since we are using Java applications, we can see how much time the queries take. We are also using some Cassandra for caching purposes, which can show that query. I checked with the developer about a simple select query that took a long time, and after I spoke with them, they fine-tuned that query, resolving the issue. New Relic proved really helpful in finding out the slow query.

New Relic is easy to use even for someone with no knowledge; by seeing the dashboard, they can easily find out the application's health and notice what is happening. This is a significant advantage compared to other APM monitoring tools, and another aspect I appreciate is its good alerting mechanism, which can throw alerts and can be configured with PagerDuty or Slack, allowing easy checks on triggers and troubleshooting using New Relic.

The best features New Relic offers include APM, which stands out most prominently, along with Synthetic monitoring, which also really helps. Infrastructure can be checked too, but since our organization is using these modules, through APM, I can see the heap memory, application CPU, and memory, which are crucial from the application's perspective. Multiple alerts can also be configured using APM, making it extremely interesting.

Synthetic monitoring is similar to a mix of APM and other tools. I can create multiple dashboards using Synthetics, allowing me to view synthetic monitoring in a single shot, which gives good confidence in checking my day-to-day work.

New Relic features customized monitoring, which allows us to customize and distribute dashboards, and it really helps us. New Relic has positively impacted my organization by providing faster detection capabilities, allowing us to easily find issues, which is the best advantage. We can also improve application performance by finding the actual root cause of issues, which I find really beneficial.

Regarding faster detection and improved performance, there are instances where, when the application specifies its heap memory around 20 GB, and it tries to reach about 90%, New Relic immediately detects the heap memory alert, sends it over Slack, and even calls us using Slack. This lets us easily detect the issue and delve into what Java is causing that high heap memory usage, allowing us to investigate further.

New Relic can get pricey for larger organizations.

Specifically, it's the pricing for larger scale deployments that could be improved.

I have been working in my current field for almost six years, and I have been using New Relic for almost five years.

New Relic is 100% stable in my experience.

The scalability of New Relic is very high, as I have never seen any downtime issues or similar problems.

I have reached out to customer support multiple times for various cases, particularly for customization such as creating dashboards, and my experience has been good.

Positive

I would advise others looking into using New Relic that it is friendly, easy to use, and distributed, with NRQL queries that you can easily write to check for issues.

New Relic is a very good product in the market compared to others; it is really helpful for beginners as they learn about this product, and it proves beneficial when performing longevity tests to find latency issues, making it very interesting to identify where actual latencies occur, resulting in it being an excellent product from my perspective.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate New Relic a 10 out of 10.