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NetBrain vs Zabbix comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

NetBrain
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (14th), Network Automation (6th)
Zabbix
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (10th), Network Monitoring Software (1st), Server Monitoring (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. NetBrain is designed for Network Troubleshooting and holds a mindshare of 1.9%, up 1.8% compared to last year.
Zabbix, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 11.1% mindshare, down 12.4% since last year.
Network Troubleshooting
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2022
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
ASM Naushad Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 16, 2022
Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes
Our company is a financial organization and we use the solution to check connectivity, CPU utilization, and hard disk utilization for all of our servers. We monitor networks to learn traffic conditions. We use threshold features to compare servers or routers and find each server's size before it…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"Zabbix is an excellent performance monitoring tool."
"Zabbix can use old data to current data to set the threshold. We can use previous data to set the threshold."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the ease with which we can set it up at customer sites with our custom Zabbix proxy and tools."
"During my testing, the features that I like the most are that it can be integrated with my system, and it provides me with reports of all of my servers."
"The most valuable feature is the alert and alarm monitoring."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.​"
"The initial setup, while not simple, is easier than other products."
"Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring. Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources."
 

Cons

"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"It would be helpful if they translated the documentation to Cyrillic languages."
"There is a bit of a learning curve during installation."
"The event correlation could be better."
"When we have a problem, we have to do a lot of research to solve it."
"Correlation of events would be a wonderful addition."
"My company wanted to do an exercise command to access IT from Cameroon. They wanted to access an FSS to a second host with second equipment that was on another coast but it is not possible on Zabbix to do it. They want to directly access from the front-end of Zabbix to access a prompt in Zabbix to an access terminal. In the front-end, there is no way to do that. That would be an important improvement."
"Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."
"We would like to monitor other touchpoints such as ATM machines. It would be great if it can provide monitoring of ATM machines. Compatibility with other products would also be great."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"There is a license required for this solution and we pay annually for our license."
"We pay the subscription for support by year."
"This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"This solution is completely open-source, so it is quite affordable."
"If you have 20,000 hosts, the support costs around €95,000 for a year."
"There is no license but we need to pay for support."
"The tool's licensing is good."
"We were searching for an open source solution and Zabbix fit the bill because it is free and open source under the GPL license."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
39%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Zabbix?
The template system in Zabbix is very beneficial as it saves time in configuration.
What needs improvement with Zabbix?
I'm using the free version of Zabbix, and I'd like to see more customization options, especially for setting trigger thresholds.
 

Comparisons

 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
1. IBM 2. Dell 3. Cisco 4. HP 5. Oracle 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon 8. Google 9. Facebook 10. Twitter 11. LinkedIn 12. Netflix 13. Adobe 14. VMware 15. Salesforce 16. SAP 17. Intel 18. AT&T 19. Verizon 20. T-Mobile 21. Vodafone 22. Ericsson 23. Nokia 24. Siemens 25. General Electric 26. Honeywell 27. Philips 28. Sony 29. Samsung 30. LG 31. Panasonic 32. Toshiba
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. Zabbix and other solutions. Updated: May 2020.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.