We compared New Relic and Zabbix across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: New Relic offers reliable monitoring capabilities and advanced traceability features. Zabbix is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and reliable performance. It provides customizable dashboards, trigger dependencies, SNMP monitoring, and problem tracking.
Room for Improvement: New Relic could improve by simplifying server removal and offering more detailed troubleshooting information. Reviewers also said the user experience could be smoother and that the documentation should be more detailed. Zabbix could reduce false positives and improve integration, cloud monitoring, and reporting.
Service and Support: Some New Relic customers commended the prompt and knowledgeable support, while others expressed dissatisfaction with slow response times and delayed resolutions. Users had mixed opinions about Zabbix customer service. Some found it helpful, while others feel it needs improvement. Customers generally rely on online documentation and community forums for assistance.
Ease of Deployment: New Relic's setup is perceived as relatively easy, and professional services are available if needed. The complexity of Zabbix's initial setup varies, and it may require an experienced group of administrators and engineers.
Pricing: New Relic's pricing is considered a pain point for many customers, but others said it is reasonable for the features provided. There are additional costs for extra features and historical information. Zabbix is a free, open-source solution, but users can purchase support services and additional features.
ROI: Some New Relic users reported a positive return on investment, but others were uncertain or have not observed any ROI. Users say that Zabbix provides a cost-effective solution.
Comparison Results: New Relic is praised for its robust monitoring capabilities, stellar customer service, and painless setup, but some users say the solution is too pricey and that the user experience could be better. Zabbix is a highly customizable open-source solution with a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including the ability to monitor virtual machines and databases. However, Zabbix’s setup can be complex and may require technical expertise.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"They instrument up from the bottom to the top – every piece of code - they have a very perfect read of what’s being done, and how long it’s taking."
"The solution is quite stable."
"It has the ability to monitor random URLs not tied to the one pinger per application (though it costs extra)."
"The alert mechanism is quite accurate when something goes wrong in your system. For example, if you have hundreds of APIs on your server, and any of the APIs is not performing well, you get an alert. When there is a drop or change in the threshold value, the beauty of New Relic is that within a fraction of seconds, all the stakeholders who are configured in the New Relic system will get an alert. That's one good thing."
"It is a one stop shop and integrated with PagerDuty seamlessly. The solution is pretty self-contained."
"To me, the most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the traceability, mainly based on the time travel method, so you get the overall response time, which is pretty helpful for developers and ADR techs looking into issues on a deeper level. New Relic APM is a very good, tailor-made solution."
"The solution offers good documentation."
"The most valuable features are infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM)."
"The most valuable features in Zabbix are those that help us overcome bottlenecks in CPU usage, as well as reduce memory delay. I know that we have only reached the tip of the iceberg of what Zabbix's features can do for us, and we have not used all of them yet."
"Dashboard and the customization of the items and triggers are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the alert and alarm monitoring."
"It meets my organizational needs. It's pretty easy to use."
"Zabbix helps to save time."
"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."
"Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues."
"Zabbix is both stable and scalable."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"In addition, its difficult to have a predictive tool to see how the application would behave in the future when it basically only shows the historical data."
"We have had issues with our agents going offline."
"The monitoring is only as good as the alerts that it produces. By having it set up fine grain alerting, it is a bit of a pain."
"It is very difficult to award the service level cycles at an endpoint level."
"Documentation could be improved in New Relic APM, so users would have more clarity on configuring the dashboard. If New Relic gave better guidelines, users would find it easier to understand the metrics and features of New Relic APM. Another area for improvement is integration with Kubernetes. Currently, the process isn't user-friendly. It's challenging and lacks documentation for users to understand how to integrate New Relic APM with Kubernetes quickly. With multiple levels of Kubernetes dockers and other DBs on different clouds, it's tricky to gather all into New Relic APM on a single dashboard. What I'd like to see in the next version of New Relic APM is a single dashboard where you can easily view which applications fall under specific APMs. If there's a search feature where you can type in a keyword to find out if an APM is related to a particular application, that would be great."
"They need to improve the alerting and dashboarding as these are the key features in DevOps."
"The price could improve."
"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."
"An area for improvement would be the ease of doing aggregation from the value or different devices."
"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."
"The user interface could be a bit better. They could update it a bit."
"I would like for this solution to be more cloud-friendly."
"Zabbix isn't very good at automation just yet."
"When we have a problem, we have to do a lot of research to solve it."
"It could be more stable."
"I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability."
New Relic is ranked 3rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 151 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 10th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 98 reviews. New Relic is rated 8.6, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of New Relic writes "Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, Elastic Observability, Grafana and Instana Dynamic APM, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios XI and Nagios Core. See our New Relic vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors, best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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.
(1) Can we design the Zabbix dashboard to look like New Relic’s rich dashboard?
You’d have to develop an agent that plugs into New Relic to get all their data 1st and then a dashboard to assimilate both as Big Panda has already done.
(2) Can we see all New Relic features with Zabbix, like End-to-end Web transaction analysis, Database Transaction analysis and reports on usability and error rate?
Not without significant development work. Zabbix does not have application (function-level) monitoring for the End-trend Web transaction analysis and Database Transaction analysis. Zabbix does externals like disk usage, CPU percentages, database statistics, etc. So, again, you’d have to develop and agent that plugs into New Relice to get all their data 1st and then the analysis tools provided by New Relic.
(3) How much development/customization effort is required to introduce the above features with Zabbix?
Significant.
(4) Does anyone have a comparison of features offered by New Relic and Zabbix?
New Relic has both the application (function-level) monitoring for the End-trend Web transaction analysis and Database Transaction analysis as well as all the external device/system monitoring statics of Zabbix. Again, for an integrated solution, it would probably be cheaper to use a product like BigPanda than to redevelop an untried in-house solution which could take 12 months to evolve a subset of the functionality.
From looking briefly over Zabbix I noticed that it's on-prem system that requires attention. It didn't seem like an easy to use system either. Although, I am not experienced enough to make those claims. New Relic is a SaaS solution, ideal for large organizations. The time it takes to create dashboards is fairly short and learning curve was minimal. They use NRql language to make system calls based on cached data in the cloud. Metrix are kept off-prem and can be traced back a year, depending on the retention subscription. Deployment is easy, consists of two agents, APM and server agent, second is free for all. In any case, putting aside that NR is one of top 3 on Gartner's magic quadrant, it is easy to use/maintain and create all kinds of dashboards.
I can agree with Carlos. The question is - what do you need? We use saymon.info to cover different systems with a common UI with drill-downs & schemas.
1) As far as I know no. The main question here is Zabbix continuous monitoring is far from NR Higher OSI layer capabilities, the graphical feeling can be emulated -agreed- but the drill-down functionality NR offers is far from any Open Source monitoring program I've seen. Sorry for that, NR is worth in some aspects.
2) Yes, NR can be exported to a Hadoop DB and exploded using BI or Zabbix sources, of course NR tries you to do exactly the opposite ..
3) A lot
4) Not me, basically they do different things , from my point of view Zabbix is a layer below New Relic. We face HW monitoring with NR wasn't usable as we had our servers dinamically managed in the cloud, so they are created and destroyed, this made NR Server monitoring to create each instance with the results of having hundreds of non-existing servers. We decided to monitor servers with the cloud apps (MS... and Zabbix) and app performance with NR.