Amazon CloudWatch vs Zabbix comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Aug 9, 2023

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:

  • Ease of Deployment: Zabbix's setup can vary in terms of ease and complexity, with some users finding it straightforward while others find it more challenging. It may require technical expertise and knowledge of Linux and programming. Amazon CloudWatch's setup is described as easy, straightforward, and not overly difficult. It can be completed within minutes or a couple of days, depending on the specific requirements and complexity of the stack. 
  • Features: Zabbix is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and wide range of features, such as customizable dashboards and trigger dependencies. In contrast, Amazon CloudWatch is appreciated for its simplicity in configuration, integration with other AWS services, and user-friendly interface.
  • Room for Improvement: Zabbix can enhance its effectiveness by addressing false positives, optimizing performance, improving the user interface, and automating network mapping. Meanwhile, Amazon CloudWatch could benefit from enhancements in monitoring application performance, generating reports, real-time monitoring, and visualizing data via dashboards.
  • Pricing: Zabbix's setup cost is uncertain, potentially involving additional purchases for features or support services. Amazon CloudWatch offers a fair pricing structure based on usage and processing, without any separate licensing fees. However, users must pay for extra storage space, and the pricing may fluctuate as the project expands.
  • ROI: Zabbix provides cost savings by eliminating expensive fees, while Amazon CloudWatch helps companies save on manual monitoring expenses and has proven to be a beneficial investment.
  • Service and Support: Users have mixed opinions about the customer service and support provided by Zabbix, while the customer service and support of Amazon CloudWatch are highly praised and appreciated, with solution architects being readily available.

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. 

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Zabbix Report (Updated: September 2023).
735,226 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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."

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"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."

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Cons
"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."

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"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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."
  • "The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."
  • "Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • "The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
  • "The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."
  • "It’s an open-source solution."
  • "The price is okay for me."
  • More Amazon CloudWatch Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is free to use but they offer support as a paid service. If you can go read the manuals and do the fine-tuning based on your needs, you do not need to pay anything and you will have a full solution."
  • "Zabbix and Grafana are both open source products, we only needed to go to their website and download the application and we began to use them. The solutions are free."
  • "This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
  • "We pay the subscription for support by year."
  • "Zabbix is a free solution but the support contact costs money."
  • "The solution is open source so is free."
  • "It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation."
  • "This solution is open-source and free to use."
  • More Zabbix Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:When you set up CloudWatch, you can't even take a lot without checking on them or without going through the whole configuration because we're configuring. It's not a frequent feature you always work… more »
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    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. With CloudWatch, users can gain insights into their applications, infrastructure, and services, enabling them to make informed decisions and take necessary actions. 

    It provides a unified view of AWS resources and applications, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and optimize performance. CloudWatch offers a range of features including customizable dashboards, automated actions, and integration with other AWS services. 

    The product is a scalable and reliable solution that helps businesses ensure the availability and performance of their applications and infrastructure.

    Zabbix is a free software tool traditionally used for monitoring your organization’s IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services. Zabbix makes it possible for you to maintain control of your infrastructure by collecting any metric from any source. The solution also offers agentless monitoring, synthetic monitoring, custom collection methods, and data transformation.

    Zabbix offers:

    • Network monitoring
    • Server monitoring
    • Cloud monitoring
    • Application monitoring
    • Service monitoring

    Zabbix Features

    Zabbix has many valuable key features, including:

    Action Log, Anomaly Detection, Auditing, Automated Actions, Availability Reports, Capacity Planning, Custom Scripts, Custom Templates, Data Retrieval, Drill-Down Reports, Encryption, Event Correlation, History Data Analysis, Metric Collection, Multiple Authentication Methods, Multiple Severity Levels, Native WMI Support for Windows Agent, Network Discovery, Notifications, Root Cause Analysis, Trend Prediction, WMI Support, Web Services Widget-based Dashboards, Zero-Maintenance

    Zabbix Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing Zabbix. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Flexible deployment options: Zabbix can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud to help you stay fully in control of your data.

    • Unlimited scalability: Zabbix is scalable to any infrastructure. It can easily scale for your personal home, or can scale for a large enterprise environment.

    • Ready-to-use templates: Zabbix comes with ready-to-use templates which makes it easy to integrate with systems you already use.

    • External vault: Zabbix enables you to keep your data secure and safe by providing an external vault storage option.

    • High availability: By using Zabbix’s high availability solution, you can negate the risk of data loss and gain 24/7 uptime.

    • Partner and vendor-backed: The solution is backed by 250+ global partners and multiple external vendors, giving you confidence in the solution.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Zabbix users.

    PeerSpot user Shibu B., Regional Manager/ Service Delivery at ASPL Info Services, says, "The solution is quite mature and very stable. The monitoring capabilities of the product are excellent.” He also adds, “The solution is very easy to scale and the product is open-source, meaning there aren't any licensing costs associated with it.”

    Julian L., Senior Specialist Critical Infrastructure at an educational organization, comments that the solution is “A complete solution that doesn't cost anything, does what I need it to do, and has easy-to-use templates and very good scalability.” He also mentions “The agents are pretty cool. They're easy to roll out. The standard out-of-the-box templates are also pretty easy to use. The integration with other learning products is also good.”

    Faycal N., CEO/Founder at Zen Networks, praises the product, mentioning, “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."

    Offer
    Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch
    Learn more about Zabbix
    Sample Customers
    AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
    Bodybuilding.com, LLC., ITtelligent Consulting Services,Eltele AS, Total Server Solutions, LLC., ChinaNetCloud
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Healthcare Company17%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Government7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Aerospace/Defense Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization30%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government7%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business49%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise31%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise43%
    Buyer's Guide
    Amazon CloudWatch vs. Zabbix
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Zabbix and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    735,226 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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.

    See our list of best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.

    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.