Zabbix vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Read 105 Zabbix reviews

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95% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Zabbix and vRealize Network Insight are network monitoring solutions with unique strengths. Zabbix has the upper hand in cost-effectiveness due to its open-source model, while vRealize Network Insight is superior in advanced features and integration.

Features: Zabbix is highly valued for automated network and item discovery, scalability, and customizable dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with third-party solutions like Grafana for data visualization. vRealize Network Insight excels in detailed traffic analysis, anomaly detection, and visibility, valuable in complex networks.

Room for Improvement: Zabbix users desire more intuitive reporting functions, improved predictive analytics, and better documentation. vRealize Network Insight users seek enhanced third-party integration, a more favorable cost structure, and improved micro-segmentation capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zabbix offers diverse deployment options and benefits from extensive community support, though it can be complex to deploy. Professional support is available if needed. vRealize Network Insight is typically deployed on-premises with good professional support, integrated with VMware products but at a higher cost due to its feature set.

Pricing and ROI: Zabbix's open-source approach provides significant ROI with no licensing fees, making it budget-friendly. vRealize Network Insight requires higher investment due to premium features, often priced per device, offering detailed analytics that justify its cost for advanced insights.

To learn more, read our detailed Zabbix vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: February 2025).

Zabbix vs. vRealize Network Insight

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

20th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

18th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zabbix

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

1st

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

105

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (9th), Server Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.7%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zabbix is 12.2%, up from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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ASM Naushad Alam

Network Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes

We have not yet purchased the commercial version so have a lack of technical ability. We do not yet fully know the key points or key features of the solution. We just use what we use along with WhatsUp Gold. Based on our use only, stability is rated a seven out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network."

"We're a smaller company so it automates a lot of the tasks and lets us focus in on building out our own solution. It's quicker, there is less building of manual solutions, and less downtime. It allows our developers to quickly develop, get provisioning done, de-provisioning, etc; the stuff that you would expect to be able to make it streamlined."

"It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way."

"A lot of time is saved when you use this type of software solution for the network. We have moved systems into the new data center and the servers and systems are much faster because of the very low latency between virtual machines."

"The initial was straightforward. You can have it up and running in one hour."

"It's user-friendly. It's similar to the GUI that most VMware products are moving to, and the consistency across those makes it easy to switch from one product to another. Also, the search bar at the top is plain text and it helps you, it guides you along with your search query, so that helps. The first day you're in there you can start building actual queries."

"By doing dependency mapping, it makes migrations more efficient. There are less outages that require engineers to spend additional hours troubleshooting the migration failures."

"The most valuable features are the monitoring and tracking. It's also intuitive and user-friendly. The screen looks exactly the same as the other appliances for VMware, so it's easy to navigate."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

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

"Simple network monitoring that is easy to install and manage."

"We like the user-interface for this solution, which makes it an easy to use tool."

"Zabbix helps to save time."

"Zabbix is scalable."

"The basic setup is very easy."

"It's one of the best products available."

"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."

More Zabbix pros

Cons

"I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards."

"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."

"There are some random glitches in the Web UI, but they are usually pretty cosmetic in nature. I don't really seem to use any browser other than Chrome with it. I also get some weird errors from time to time on the hardware NetFlow Collectors, where it doesn't sync data."

"There could be some deeper analytics into packet inspection and trace flows. It could use some kind of machine learning to look at Layer 7 traffic for potential malware or corrupt packets."

"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."

"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."

"If it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, what script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls."

"Support could be much better."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

"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."

"Zabbix does not draw automatic mapping of the network, this is something they should add in the future. There is a lot of effort that is involved in tailoring some of the settings which could be made easier."

"I am having difficulties connecting it to Grafana, as well as some of the other plugins like Kibana."

"For us, the initial setup was complex"

"I think the reporting part of Zabbix can be improved in terms of more user-friendly graphics to display the collected data. Many simple users who don't know how to use Zabbix properly might get confused by the reporting, although at the same time it is very versatile for my company."

"The main problem with Zabbix is that you have to spend time writing templates for all of the products that you have."

"The product could be more secure and more stable."

"Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."

More Zabbix cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"It has brought more money into our company."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."

"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

"It’s free of cost."

"This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"Its licensing is fair. It seems to be much cheaper than others."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation."

"For pricing, it's free. We don't pay anything for it. They open-source the code, and people pay for support."

"We are using the free, open-source version."

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

More Zabbix pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user174738

IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

10%

Educational Organization

39%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

The sales team often complains about the cost whenever we need to quote vRealize Network.

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Since Broadcom acquired VMware, it has been experiencing challenges. Many sales processes are not well defined. They can show a little bit more information because vRealize Network Insight is virtu...

What do you like most about Zabbix?

The template system in Zabbix is very beneficial as it saves time in configuration.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zabbix?

The cost is minimal. It is literally free.

What needs improvement with Zabbix?

For me, Zabbix is very straightforward. I cannot think of any improvements needed. It's a very mature product. The only issue I can note is that it's Linux-based, and Linux documentation is not the...

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Product Reports

vRealize Network Insight

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Also Known As

Arkin

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Overview

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software that provides real-time monitoring and alerting for servers, networks, applications, and services.

It offers a wide range of features including data collection, visualization, and reporting.

With its user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, Zabbix helps organizations ensure the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure.

Sample Customers

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

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

Zabbix vs. vRealize Network Insight