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.
"The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."
"For servers and for applications, it was very, very efficient."
"The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want."
"In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time... The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities."
"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."
"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."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"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 most valuable feature is network traffic monitoring."
"Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues."
"There is less computing power needed for scaling."
"The integration capabilities and APIs are the best part."
"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."
"It meets my organizational needs. It's pretty easy to use."
"The flexibility of this solution is amazing."
"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."
"Centreon introduced network discovery in the most recent update. However, it doesn't work well. Our previous monitoring tool could discover networking equipment on the network and identify the relationships between the devices."
"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"The problem with the reporting is you have to configure the report, and after that, you will have the same report every month, every week, every day. You have to sync it in order to have a great report."
"Currently, we have to go through all of the different templates and take a look at how the template is configured, and how specific parameters may change across different templates with different precedents, megatons, etc. It's a lot of work and involves trial and error. I wish they could simplify the process."
"Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes."
"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."
"Implementation is always tailored to the customer and the kind of information we need from the client to carry it out can make them very uncomfortable. Sometimes the clients are not ready to share it."
"Zabbix isn't very good at automation just yet."
"Correlation of events would be a wonderful addition."
"When we have a problem, we have to do a lot of research to solve it."
"If you want to use all of the features then you have to pay a licensing fee."
"The performance reporting could be improved."
"The product could be more secure and more stable."
"When using this solution in enterprise monitoring, you are able to see that there are some issues with equipment that could be causing a problem. Sometimes you want to make a root command that you do not want to be executed automatically. What we have tried to do is open an SSH session directly from the solution's interface but it is not possible."
Centreon is ranked 8th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 9 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 41 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Zabbix is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Great ready-to-use connectors and integrations with excellent visual dashboards". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Very mature, easy to scale, and free to use". Centreon is most compared with Nagios Core, Nagios XI, PRTG Network Monitor, Icinga and SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Nagios XI, Nagios Core, Splunk, PRTG Network Monitor and SolarWinds NPM. See our Centreon vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors, and best Network Monitoring Software vendors.
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