"The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."
"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."
"You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view."
"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."
"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."
"We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good."
"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."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"It lets us know whether devices are getting out of date and tracked warranties. Spiceworks also gave me visibility in terms of what software was installed on each device and its status."
"It shows the users that are currently logged in, which is not something that Active Directory by default will ever let you know up front."
"Spiceworks is generic and free."
"The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free. Monitoring of printers for low toner. Finding machines that have low memory or low hard disk space."
"The most valuable features are the inventory and personalization."
"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."
"The solution is open-source, easy to manage, and user-friendly making it easy for anyone to use."
"Zabbix is both stable and scalable."
"Zabbix is scalable."
"The integration with third-party tools and the alerts are most valuable."
"The solution is quite mature and very stable."
"It's a flexible solution."
"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."
"Centreon is actually missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD."
"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."
"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."
"Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature."
"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."
"I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things."
"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."
"Having an integrated asset management tool, where I can plug in things that are offline, would be good."
"There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution."
"The network mapping could be improved. Putting together an actual bonafide network map would be really nice."
"Since Spiceworks is a free tool, it's not very scriptable or customizable."
"Once a device was recognized on the network, Spiceworks never got rid of it even after you took it off the network. You had to go in and manually remove it."
"One of the things we don't like is that Zabbix has a license structure with a price that is high compared to the competition. It's very high, for example, compared to something like Microsoft Teams."
"I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability."
"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."
"I think the reporting part of Zabbix can be improved in terms of more user-friendly graphics to display the collected data. Many simple users who don't know how to use Zabbix properly might get confused by the reporting, although at the same time it is very versatile for my company."
"For us, the initial setup was complex"
"The user interface could be better."
"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."
"I am having difficulties connecting it to Grafana, as well as some of the other plugins like Kibana."
Earn 20 points
Spiceworks is ranked 19th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 5 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 44 reviews. Spiceworks is rated 6.8, while Zabbix is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Spiceworks writes "Has good policy enforcement but the network mapping could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Very mature, easy to scale, and free to use". Spiceworks is most compared with SolarWinds NPM, JIRA Service Management, ServiceNow, Nagios Core and SysAid, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Nagios XI, Splunk, Nagios Core, SolarWinds NPM and Zenoss Service Dynamics. See our Spiceworks vs. Zabbix report.
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