Pico Corvil Analytics vs Zabbix comparison

"We like the dashboards because they essentially organize all the sessions into one viewpoint."

"With the Corvil Stored Data Analyzer module, we can use it for test data or a set of production data to set up the configuration for latency setup, so we can use the fields to correlate messages."

"We use the data to analyze how much time we spend within the applications. Then, based on that, we are doing multiple analyses and types of investigations to work on reducing the amount of time spent on the latency, which helps our applications."

"The performance metrics are pretty good. We've got everything from the network layer to the actual application layer. We can see what's going on with things like sending time and batching."

"We can use CLI with the UI for configuring the new monitoring system, which is good."

"The analytics features of Corvil are really good... As long as you know what the field is in the message, you can build your metrics based on that field... It means you can do the analytics that you actually care for. You can customize it..."

"What is most valuable is the ability to troubleshoot when a client complains of spikes in latencies. It gives us the ability to go granular, all the way down to looking at the network packets and analyze them."

"Time-series graphs are very good for performance analysis. We can do comparisons... We can say this is the latency in the last 24 hours, and this was the same 24-hour period a week ago and overlay the two time-series graphs on top of each other, so we can see the difference. That's a really powerful tool for us."

"The most valuable feature is monitoring."

"The calculations part is the most valuable."

"The resource usage, CPU utilization, disk usage, network monitoring, network performance, and alerting features are invaluable."

"The solution is stable."

"I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP."

"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."

"It's a very reliable platform and we've never had any issues regarding the scalability or the stability of Zabbix."

"The product is very stable."

"Before I got the Corvil training... one thing that was not very efficient was that every time you had to create a new stream or a new session from within Corvil... you had to tell it what protocol the message is going to come through and how to correlate messages, etc... After I went for the training, they had already added these nice features in the 9.4 version where it could do auto-discovery... Based on the traffic that it has already seen, it could create sessions on the fly."

"The analytics feature is very nice, but it's mostly software. We are hoping that it could be embedded in ASICs, so it could be faster."

"I have seen errors where the CNE and the CMC haven't synced because of something missing in the CMC, which was there in the CNE. We would get some type of error, but it doesn't actually say what exactly was missing in the CNE."

"For FIX protocol, maybe we could have built-in configurations for signatures and decoders. Also, for certain protocols, which are newer, we would like to just add the signatures within the decoders itself."

"It's quite difficult to see, sometimes, how hard your Corvil is working. When we had a very busy feed that chucked out a lot of data it wasn't working very well on Corvil. We had to raise a case for it. It turned out to be that, in fact, we were overloading Corvil."

"In terms of performance analysis, if you really want to dig down into the minutiae and get statistics on the important things... that would be the only piece lacking because, in our environment, we have thousands and thousands of symbols. With the architecture that Corvil is built on, it's cumbersome."

"Overall, the Corvil device needs a little bit of training for people to handle it. If that could be reduced and made more user-friendly, more intuitive, it would be better."

"Alerting isn't great... you can only put in one email address in. And that's for all kinds of alerting on the box."

"To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial."

"There is a bit of a learning curve during installation."

"The documentation could be improved."

"Zabbix could improve when it comes to large-scale use cases. Additionally, the inventory could be better when connecting to other solutions, such as ServiceNow. There show to be better integration with other platforms and storage."

"The graphical user interface could be customized a little bit more, and also the dashboard could be more friendly."

"Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue."

"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 isn't very good at automation just yet."

"I like the way they've decoupled the hardware now... Everything's based on the licensing side now. The way they do the packs is fair. It's very flexible in that we're not charged per decoder, we're charged for a certain pack. Whether we use one decoder or 20 decoders, as long as they're in the same pack, there's no extra charge. Expensive but fair is how I'd summarize it."

"Corvil has reduced the time it takes us to isolate root causes."

"It is pricey versus its competitors."

"Pico Corvil Analytics is expensive. There are several competitors in the market. Selling this solution to a trading firm might be challenging as there are several other solutions available that can perform basic similar operations, such as using Wireshark and Python scripts to obtain the required values. However, that does not nearly approach the comprehensive end-2-end automated depth of metrics and their correlations that Pico Corvil Analytics provides."

"We bought a box from Corvil and it was $200,000 for one big CNE. Then there are obviously the recurring maintenance fees. The licensing is perpetual but the maintenance fees are not."

"As I am working more with Corvil, it looks like it is improving diagnostic times."

"The pricing is very expensive. Corvil could work on the pricing."

"It is a true open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

"It is open source. If you want to have a subscription or official support, you can pay for it. They have different plans, which are not that expensive. The plans are based on per monitoring server, not per monitored equipment. So, it is not at all expensive, and you can also live without the support if you want a cheaper option."

"We use the open-source version of Zabbix."

"We purchased Zabbix for a good price, including support"

"The tool's licensing is good."

"It is free, which allows us to reduce costs."

"The solution is free. However, many open-sourced tools start out free but eventually start charging."

"We were searching for an open source solution and Zabbix fit the bill because it is free and open source under the GPL license."