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 feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"Prometheus is a great solution for monitoring."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is that we can receive information in different formats."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"Prometheus provides a flexible and adjustable querying and describing time, allowing for more responsive monitoring."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."
"We use Zabbix to monitor our organization's IT infrastructure and workstations. We don't use Microsoft Intune since it's expensive. The tool's real-time alerting system has proved crucial for us, particularly when a new device joins a network that is not one of our own devices. It notifies us about the presence of this new device, allowing us to investigate further. Additionally, it alerts us about disk usage, memory usage, and the software installed on the machine."
"The basic setup is very easy."
"Dashboard and the customization of the items and triggers are the most valuable features."
"The integration with third-party tools and the alerts are most valuable."
"Health and communication links availability."
"We have found that Zabbix is more easy to use than other applications."
"It's a flexible solution."
"We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"The scalability must be improved."
"There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them."
"The DSL could be improved."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"Its UI needs to be improved a little bit more so that an end-user is also able to handle it. I can handle it, but others should also be able to handle it in a better way. It becomes complex when we are growing and need to add proxies. We need more scalability features and documentation for different use cases. A lot of articles are available, but they need to be in proper documentation. For example, when you have thousands of servers that have to be monitored in different regions of the world, there should be some kind of documentation to describe how you can create proxies and add them. Sometimes, when you are using the database, it can get overloaded. When the network is growing, the number of transactions becomes very high, and the database gets overloaded. There should be information about how to reduce the load on the MySQL database, which is what Zabbix is using. The market is growing a lot, and it should be enhanced for a lot more things. We are currently bringing enhancements at our end for different use cases. For example, when dockerization is going on, how can we check the logs inside the Dockers. We should also be able to monitor and check the number of logins and add features such as SSO login and two-factor authentication as a protocol. These are the security features and concerns that we have to deal with. Currently, we are developing modules to add features to Zabbix, but they should also work on these features."
"Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."
"I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability."
"The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes."
"Zabbix is powerful, but it is difficult to understand initially. There are many things that can be improved, but we might not be using Zabbix to its fullest extent. The software has more features than we need."
"The user interface could be better."
"Zabbix claims that there is an auto-discovery process but my team member was facing difficulty and was told that it's not really automatic, and there are some manual steps."
"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."
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 101 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 Splunk Enterprise Security, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Nagios XI. See our Prometheus vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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.