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.
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The integration and configuration of New Relic is straightforward and easy."
"The most valuable feature is the New Relic APM module to deep-dive into the application, to get bottlenecks to the surface, and to improve application performance. Also, the New Relic Insights module creates a real-time dashboard on application performance to create awareness for the DevOps team."
"New features are added often."
"The synthetic alert is the most valuable feature in New Relic APM. I also like the time travel feature and find traceability useful in the solution. New Relic APM also has good response times."
"It has the ability to monitor random URLs not tied to the one pinger per application (though it costs extra)."
"As New Relic is already integrated with Drupal, we can get our projects done with best practice and with the best value that we believe in."
"Every time there is a crisis, high traffic, or if we see a problem with a server, we go to New Relic and monitor it to determine the cause."
"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."
"There are lots of great features and functionality within the solution."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of virtual machines."
"The solution allows for good integration with other products."
"We value the auto-host discovery, template import, bulk import/export features. Newer versions also add nice features, such as multi-IP per host."
"The flexibility of this solution is amazing."
"Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product."
"We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes."
"The best thing about Zabbix is the integration and the APIs that are included are very fast"
"The technical support needs improvement."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"New Relic APM could improve error debugging and the correlation with the logs. We are receiving some alerts or alarms but we need to correlate with the error log, but it is difficult if it is more than seven months retention period, it is hard to trace. We need this especially for getting historical information."
"They should bring the pricing down to be more competitive."
"The APIs could be better. I would also like more APIs and features to integrate with streaming solutions, like Kinesis or Kafka."
"One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability."
"In the next release, I'd like to see a better pricing structure."
"New Relic APM can improve the information when we dig deeper to check a problem. There should be more detailed information provided."
"I would like to be able to invest less time in IT and ad hocs. We should be concentrating on other issues."
"One thing that we noticed was that historical information was only for a limited period, which was not helpful in certain scenarios. For example, if I want to size my system for an event for New Year or Christmas season based on the historical data, I won't be able to find the historical data. Currently, the data is limited to three months. It would be helpful if they can provide historical data for a longer duration so that we can plan our system accordingly."
"Zabbix isn't a great tool for cloud-specific monitoring - its connection to public clouds needs to be improved. Other areas for improvement would be the lack of dashboards and integrations."
"They should open an SSH session from the web interface."
"The product delivers false positives during reporting because of flapping. Other reasonably priced alternatives may have better performance."
"The only improvement I would suggest, revolves around its AI and ML capabilities."
"Correlation of events would be a wonderful addition."
"Implementing Zabbix is difficult. I've deployed many solutions over the years, and Zabbix is the hardest to implement. You have to do some development to get it to work with IBM, Micro Focus, or HP products."
"The networking monitor is not too easy to work with."
"As far as improvements, sometimes I get a bit frustrated when I move from a previous version to a new one because some configuration has changed—I need to investigate the documentation to deal with some configuration. But it doesn't take much time, so it's okay."
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New Relic is ranked 6th in Network Monitoring Software with 152 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 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 Core and Nagios XI. See our New Relic vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors, and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.
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(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.