New Relic or Zabbix?

(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.

look at this --> http://www.alyvix.com/aboutus/

Zabbix is very powerfoul for web application monitoring

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 http://saymon.info/en 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.