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.
"It is a stable solution...Based on the feedback I have received from my colleagues in our company's IT department, the setup phase of the solution is relatively easy."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"The best thing about Prometheus is its integration."
"It is an efficient solution."
"The most valuable feature is that we can receive information in different formats."
"Zabbix is scalable."
"In terms of customization and integration, we have more flexibility. We can automate configurations, define deletion rules, and customize based on the needs. The client interface allows for further configuration, making it quite comprehensive."
"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."
"It's a flexible solution."
"It has an intuitive UI with beautiful graphs and customizable maps."
"Zabbix is an excellent performance monitoring tool."
"The solution allows you to configure and customize how you want to collect information from servers or other systems."
"Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
"Its stability could be even better."
"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The DSL could be improved."
"There isn’t much clarity regarding the issues that happen at the server end. It is a push model and from the client’s point of view, it needs to look better and solve remote issues."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"There are areas of improvement. The database grows really fast. So, when you install Zabbix, you have to deal with some issues, like the database. We become pretty big very fast."
"The user interface could be a bit better. They could update it a bit."
"The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes."
"The server monitoring could be better."
"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."
"Improvement is needed as per customer requirements."
"I want Zabbix to improve the UX/UI. Zabbix doesn't use a JavaScript chart for images, and I want them to improve this."
"Implementation is always tailored to the customer and the kind of information we need from the client to carry it out can make them very uncomfortable. Sometimes the clients are not ready to share it."
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.
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