We compared Zabbix and Amazon CloudWatch across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: Zabbix's setup can vary in ease and complexity, requiring technical expertise and knowledge of Linux and programming. However, it offers extensive features, customization options, and a free open-source version. On the other hand, Amazon CloudWatch has an easy and straightforward setup process, user-friendly interface, and good technical support. It is highly valued for its simplicity, stability, scalability, and integration with other AWS services. However, it has limitations in monitoring application performance and generating reports. Pricing-wise, Zabbix is free and open-source, while CloudWatch's pricing is considered reasonable.
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"What I found most valuable in Amazon CloudWatch is that it gives you detailed information, which I found helpful because it can even provide you with data for the past one minute, which is quite granular. That was what helped me most in terms of finding the root causes. Task automation is another valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch."
"It's a very simple logging system."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability."
"Scheduling is a valuable feature."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"The integration capabilities and APIs are the best part."
"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."
"We like the user-interface for this solution, which makes it an easy to use tool."
"Zabbix is good for discovery."
"The most valuable feature is the protocol to manage anything."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides network segregation for server monitoring."
"The solution is quite mature and very stable."
"The level of discovery-based configuration that lets us auto-configure the monitoring for various systems is a valuable feature."
"Improvement of SSSD logs would be beneficial."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"I found several areas for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch. First is that it's tough to track issues and find out where it's going wrong. The process takes longer. For example, if I get an exception error, I read the logs, search, go to AWS Cloud, then to the groups to find the keyword to determine what's wrong. Another area for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch is that it's slow in terms of log streaming. It requires an entire twenty-four hours for scanning, rather than just one hour. This issue can be solved with Elasticsearch streaming with Kibana, but it requires a lot of development effort and integration with Kibana or Splunk, and this also means I need a separate developer and software technical stack to do the indexing and streaming to Kibana. It's a manual effort that you need to do properly, so log streaming should be improved in Amazon CloudWatch. The AWS support person should also have a better understanding of the logs in Amazon CloudWatch. What I'd like added to the solution is a more advanced search function, particularly one that can tell you more information or special information. Right now, the search function is difficult to use because it only gives you limited data. For example, I got an error message saying that the policy wasn't created. I only know the amount the customer paid for the policy, the mobile number, and the customer name, but if I use those details, the information won't show up on the logs. I need to enter more details, so that's the type of fuzzy matching Amazon CloudWatch won't provide. If this type of search functionality is provided, it will be very helpful for businesses and companies that provide professional services to customers, like ours."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."
"Correlation of events would be a wonderful addition."
"It would be helpful if they translated the documentation to Cyrillic languages."
"Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue."
"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."
"I would like for this solution to be more cloud-friendly."
"The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes."
"The System Center Operations Manager can be improved."
"An area for improvement would be the ease of doing aggregation from the value or different devices."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 6th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Cloud Monitoring Software with 35 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.2, while Zabbix is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Very mature, easy to scale, and free to use". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Nagios XI, Azure Cost Management and SolarWinds NPM, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Checkmk, Nagios XI, Centreon, Splunk Enterprise Security and Icinga. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Zabbix report.
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We monitor all Cloud 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.