

Zabbix and Cribl are both competitors in the enterprise monitoring and data management sector. Cribl may hold an advantage with its effective data routing and transformative capabilities.
Features: Zabbix is noted for its scalability, monitoring, and auto-discovery capabilities, offering integrations with third-party tools like Grafana. It is highly adaptable for various environments, providing flexibility and numerous customization options. Cribl offers powerful data processing and transformation features, emphasizing real-time data manipulation and supporting multiple destinations and integrations. Users benefit from its user-friendliness, especially when managing extensive data operations.
Room for Improvement: Zabbix's reporting and dashboard functionalities need refinement for improved professionalism. It can be complex for non-technical users, and there is a demand for enhanced security features and automation. Cribl could improve its logging and debugging capabilities and expand its configuration documentation. Users also indicate a need for better handling of historical data and consistency in its versioning system.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zabbix primarily relies on community support due to its open-source nature, with many users turning to forums for help. It is mainly deployed on-premises. Cribl offers both on-premises and hybrid cloud deployment options, receiving positive feedback on customer service and maintaining a structured support system. It tends to handle technical support issues with plenty of resources and training.
Pricing and ROI: As an open-source solution, Zabbix often incurs no licensing costs, making it an economically appealing choice, with optional commercial support available. Cribl provides a cost-effective alternative to solutions like Splunk, contributing to significant savings by optimizing data workflows and reducing other licensing needs. Cribl continues to balance competitive pricing with its expanding features, ensuring substantial ROI as prices increase annually.
What we've seen is really an overall reduction of just shy of 40% in our ingest into our SIM platform versus prior to having Cribl.
The second thing is that data aggregation, sampling, and reduction that we're able to do of the data, lowering our overall data volume, both traversing the network as well as what's being stored inside of our final solutions.
In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
Usually, within an hour, we get a response, and we are able to work with them back and forth until we resolve the issues.
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
It is so straightforward that I have never had to use the support.
The infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
Compared to other SIEM tools I use, any slight change on the operating system end impacts a lot on our SIEM tools and other things, but Cribl performs well in that regard.
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
Zabbix is very scalable and lightweight.
Zabbix has high scalability.
I would rate its scalability ten out of ten.
Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
If the pipeline is down and we receive an alert that it's not sending information to the log collection platform for more than one or two hours, if we receive an alert, it would be great.
Zabbix is very scalable and lightweight.
Zabbix is quite stable, and we haven't had any problems with Zabbix itself.
I think the stability of Zabbix is around five to six on a scale of ten, where ten is the best and one is the worst.
A more stringent role-based access control feature would enhance security and allow granular control over what users can see and access.
If we can have more internal logs and more debug logs to validate the error, that would be beneficial because instead of reaching out to Cribl support, we can troubleshoot and find the root cause ourselves.
In terms of large datasets—whether they originated from network inputs, virtual machines, or cloud instances—ingesting the data into the destination was relatively easy.
The only issue I can note is that it's Linux-based, and Linux documentation is not the best.
The potential and customization is a little difficult because you have to learn scripts.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
They have a universal license that allows us to consume the portions of Cribl that we want to use or flex into other portions of Cribl.
Zabbix is providing everything free of cost.
It is literally free.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
Cribl has a feature called JSON Unroll or Unroll function that allows you to differentiate the events; each event will come ingested as a single log instead of piling it up with multiple events.
The Cribl UI is very simple and easy to use, particularly when working with data from various sources; it makes it very easy to create pipelines, add complex logic to those pipelines, and then gives you a preview of what your data looks like before applying that pipeline and what you get after.
If disk usage surpasses a threshold, say 70%, I receive alerts and can take proactive action.
Zabbix has a lot of features, including monitoring, status updates, and collecting information telemetry from storages and servers as well.
Zabbix is Linux-based open-source software, and the main use case is to reduce costs.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Zabbix | 2.8% |
| Cribl | 1.1% |
| Other | 96.1% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 9 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 56 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 34 |
Cribl offers advanced data transformation and routing with features such as data reduction, plugin configurations, and log collection within a user-friendly framework supporting various deployments, significantly reducing data volumes and costs.
Cribl is designed to streamline data management, offering real-time data transformation and efficient log management. It supports seamless SIEM migration, enabling organizations to optimize costs associated with platforms like Splunk through data trimming. The capability to handle multiple data destinations and compression eases log control. With flexibility across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments, Cribl provides an adaptable interface that facilitates quick data model replication. While it significantly reduces data volumes, enhancing overall efficiency, there are areas for improvement, including compatibility with legacy systems and integration with enterprise products. Organizations can enhance their operational capabilities through certification opportunities and explore added functionalities tailored towards specific industry needs.
What are Cribl's most important features?Cribl sees extensive use in industries prioritizing efficient data management and cost optimization. Organizations leverage its capabilities to connect between different data sources, including cloud environments, improving both data handling and storage efficiency. Its customization options appeal to firms needing specific industry compliance and operational enhancements.
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software that provides real-time monitoring and alerting for servers, networks, applications, and services.
It offers a wide range of features including data collection, visualization, and reporting.
With its user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, Zabbix helps organizations ensure the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure.
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