Prometheus and Zabbix are popular network monitoring solutions. Zabbix stands out for its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, customizable alerting system, and extensive reporting options. Prometheus is praised for its powerful querying language, intuitive alerting system, and flexible data model.
Comparison of Prometheus and Zabbix features:
Room for Improvement: Prometheus reviewers mention a steeper learning curve compared to Zabbix and the need for additional tools for long-term storage and visualization. While Zabbix offers a user-friendly interface, some reviewers criticize its scalability for very large deployments.
Prometheus and Zabbix ROI: Both Prometheus and Zabbix are open-source solutions, making them accessible to use and benefit from large and active communities that provide support through forums and online resources. Zabbix also offers paid commercial support options. The ROI comes from improved infrastructure monitoring, leading to faster problem identification, reduced downtime, and optimized resource utilization. The cost includes setup, configuration, and potentially integrating additional tools with Prometheus.
Deployment and customer support: Prometheus has a simpler setup with a lightweight footprint. Zabbix requires installing an agent on each monitored system and configuring a central server with a database. Both tools offer extensive documentation for deployment. For larger deployments, Prometheus' horizontal scaling might be more favorable. Also, Prometheus integrates well with cloud-native environments due to its pull-based model.
The summary above is based on 74 interviews we conducted recently with Zabbix and Prometheus users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The most valuable features of the solution are metrics scraping capabilities and the open source community and support."
"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"Prometheus is an open-source product that helps mold and improve it per our requirements. It is a lightweight solution that gives you many different metrics you can use in your application. The product offers complete granularity of your infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with other tools like Grafana, which offers dashboard visibility. Prometheus is an extensively used product. I haven't seen any organization that is not using it."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus are the many functions available. The functions are helpful for understanding the behavior of applications and infrastructure."
"It is a stable solution...Based on the feedback I have received from my colleagues in our company's IT department, the setup phase of the solution is relatively easy."
"It lets me proactively identify and resolve system issues. This, in terms of, most of the time, really reduces downtime. Because when there are notifications on time when we engage it quickly on time, our downtime is highly reduced. So basically, Prometheus is for monitoring and alerting."
"The sky is the limit because the solution is a flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications."
"I like its lightweight configuration functions."
"The solution allows for good integration with other products."
"We have found that Zabbix is more easy to use than other applications."
"It has improved our server performance monitoring overall. We know right away when there are problems. It has built-in statistics, so we can go back and see if there's spiking. We can check what's happening every day around the same time and check the configuration to see if there's something that's running and needs to be fixed."
"Zabbix is good for discovery."
"I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP."
"Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues."
"The initial setup was very quick. The first time it was long because I didn't know it yet. I was only using Windows. The first time was very difficult because of the operating system."
"The level of discovery-based configuration that lets us auto-configure the monitoring for various systems is a valuable feature."
"Prometheus' UI color can improve. Using the Prometheus UI for configuration or analyzing queries is a horrible experience."
"If you want to collect details of metrics, you should be able to write a query for it directly. I want the product to offer better queries for the metrics."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"The solution's error handling part could be improved."
"There isn’t much clarity regarding the issues that happen at the server end. It is a push model and from the client’s point of view, it needs to look better and solve remote issues."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"The alert functionality is kind of lackluster."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"In terms of user-friendliness, large maps could be more interactive. We should be able to click on some areas and move some objects. It would make it simpler to see things while analyzing some dedicated parameters."
"The main problem with Zabbix is that you have to spend time writing templates for all of the products that you have."
"There are not too much documentation or manuals. We found the tutorials very easy to understand but do not go deep enough in the use of Zabbix. We need more manuals, proper use, documentation, etc."
"It would be helpful if they translated the documentation to Cyrillic languages."
"The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes."
"I had problems using Zabbix when working with SUSE Enterprise; many companies use SUSE."
"The documentation gets a bit messy between versions and is not too detailed, which is a bit painful for first-timers, especially when they run into issues."
"The user web interface is a little bit too basic, we need to link Zabbix to Grafana to have more options, such as graphs and charts. The interface needs to be improved. Additionally, there could be better integration with Grafana API."
Prometheus is ranked 9th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 32 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 10th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 98 reviews. Prometheus is rated 8.4, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and AWS X-Ray, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios XI and Nagios Core. See our Prometheus vs. Zabbix report.
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