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December 2025

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

Hi everyone,

I want to share a story about cooking toasts and tell you how we were expanding the functionality of Zabbix by a coil of wire and an integrated circuit Open Source solutions. First things first.

Imagine, you work in an organization (and it can be yours) where its business process is supported by one or more IT systems. There is a monitoring system. Then a little blurred vision, and it is not clear whether /the industrial system is free or Open Source. However, there aresituations when all the sensors aregreen, but the business process gives unexplained setbacks, showing a decrease of key indicators. Matter-of-factly, the situation is out of control and your intervention is required. It’s quite a common case. A systematical approach for solving this problem will provide a drafting services model.

Tom Wujec who provides services for the visualization of the processes occurring in the companies (not just IT), carried out a curious study. He asked different people to draw the process of toasting. See below for some results of this work.

What do we see on this pictures? Right you are. You can see objects and links presented in any system. The more you see them , the more the approach will be systematical. The correct degree of granularity will more accurately monitor the "health" of business system. To construct a circuit, you can try to use the Visio, but much more interesting is to take a marker to draw connections, adhesive sheets for objects and to portray your system on the whiteboard. The more is the quantity of yellow leaves, the more are the links, the higher is the chance to determine the maximum number of monitoring points for right resolving of the problem.

And now it's high time to tell you about our experience in the field of expansion of standard functional Zabbix and of systematical approach described above. There are exactly two of them.

The first is Mapping systems and the installation of thermal services’ card. In view of our considerable experience in the monitoring of the banking business processes, we give an example of exactly this area. Let’s consider three of the most common banking systems. If there is a more typical system in your bank it will not be considered here.

Home banking (online banking):

Enterprise serial bus (ESB):

Decision-making system (Credit convey):

In our application, it will look like this (yes, the structure is somewhat broken, but visibility still persists):

You can go to a lower level in case of need. And, last but not least, when you move the object pops up pop-up window with the description of the event and with a link to the graph in Zabbix

Through this approach, and given the level of details, we get friendly dashboards in the output, and at the same time a simple problem of localization tool. A few words about the features of our system:

- Visualization of the dependencies among enterprise systems;
- Set up of the degree of mutual components’influence (due weight);
- Integration with Zabbix (objects on the heat map are associated with flip-flops);
- Pop-up windows with text events when you hover over the event object;
- Visual Interface Communication Configuration objects;
- Visual communication setup interface of objects with triggers Zabbix.

As an example, some already developed interfaces.

Adding objects to a heat map:

Adding integrations from Zabbix:

Connecting Zabbix triggers to objects on the heat map:

The system is based on Google Charts and Bootstrap. While this is an alpha version, we plan to develop it further, adding useful pieces of industrial systems, which have been working successfully for many years. I will try to keep you in touch and to publish posts on the basis of practices developed.

The second experience is the integration with Zabbix and heat maps of synthetic transactions functionality. In fact, it’s a continuation of the heat map, and the look from the other side. Definitely controlling the system only from the application and infrastructure, you will not have the necessary information completeness. Synthetic transactions will allow having a look as a user and isolate the problem even before the first user requests to the Help Desk.

Synthetic transactions are based on the framework phantom.js (but nothing prevents you to go to casper.js, to pure selenium or anything else on your liking). In our test lab the execution of scenario is configured through cron and then the data are transferred to Zabbix by Zabbix trapper. As an example, the test scripts are logged into the MTS (Russia's mobile operator) personal account and receive money from the demand balance and the traffic in the Internet package (I can send it to you if you interested in this script). In the banking community, the most likely use of this tool can be, for example, online banking. Nobody will prevent you to log into the system and flip 1 dollar from one account to another.

Collected items from our example are as follows:

Each has its own schedule.

I do not want to say that the use of Open Source solutions monitoring is a tablet from all troubles. I will reveal an open secret: as in physics, there is the law of conservation of money and effort. The more money you invest into a finished product, the less effort for improvement, and vice versa. Always should be guided by common sense, the available budget and the human factor: ready to be your team to throw in the recess of business monitoring on the first call?

Zabbix provides flexible functionality over Nagios and other open source monitoring softwares like opennms, zenoss etc. It is widely used in market these days due to its easy administration and configuration.

Pros:-  1. Zabbix provides a user friendly GUI interface for administration and configuration for monitoring servers and network. 

2. Zabbix is open source software, so no licenses needs to be purchased. 

3. Zabbix clients can be configued easily by installing Zabbix client software on client machines on the network. Zabbix client machines can be of either windows, linux or any unix machine. 

4. User parameters can be configured for customized scripts. 

5. Configuration/administration documentations are available on official web site of Zabbix and videos/additional documentations are also available on other popular websites like youtube etc.

Cons:- 1. Installation is little complex, tedious, time consuming and prone to user errors. However, once installed, it provides user friendly interface for all administrative tasks. 

2. Some scripting knowledge is required in order to make changes to configuration files. 

3. Adding custom services requires reloading the config or restarting the service.

Alternate Vendors:- Nagios, Zenoss, Cacti !!

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 using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into.

Nagios

Pros:

• Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware
• Nagios has a web interface that helps users check network health from anywhere
• Creates reports on trends, availability, alerts, notifications — via the web interface
• Monitors network redundancies and failure rates

Cons:

• Web GUI is not good
• Steep learning curve is required for managing config files to run devices and tests

Zabbix

Pros:

• Zabbix is fully configurable from its web front end and so it is easier to use Zabbix
  than the popular Nagios — whose configuration requires several text files
• Further, Zabbix combines both monitoring and trending functionality, while Nagios
  focuses exclusively on monitoring
• The Web monitoring function of Zabbix allows users to monitor the availability and
  performance of web-based services over time. Moreover, this functionality allows
  Zabbix to log into a web application periodically and run through a series of typical
  steps being performed by a customer
• It’s open-source and has a well-designed Web GUI and overall concept
• Zabbix offers good alerts, dedicated agents and an active user community

Cons:

• Zabbix is not suitable for large networks with 1,000+ nodes, due to PHP performance
  and Web GUI limitations
• A lack of real-time tests, as well as complicated templates and alerting rules

Solarwinds

Pros:

• SolarWinds’s ConnectNow Topology Mapping allows users’ environment to be mapped
  in real time automatically. This provides graphical visibility into users’ networks,
  requiring no additional work or tools
• SolarWinds’s Integrated Wireless Poller monitors wireless devices for security and other issues and reduces the difficulty in managing these items, allowing more widespread use of wireless technologies
• Excellent UI design
• Customizable, automated network mapping
• Great community support provided by Thwack
• Mobile access
• Native VMware support

Cons:

• Unable to configure alerts from the web-console
• Clumsy “Group Dependency” configuration
• Reporting module needs better ad-hoc reports
• No native support for Microsoft Hyper-V.  Features SNMP only

PRTG Network Monitor

Paessler has completely redesigned its Web interface to make it simpler to use. In addition, the company has added support for a mini-HTML interface for mobile devices, including iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids and Windows Mobile devices. What’s more, with the iPhone app — available through the iTunes App Store — IT managers can not only receive alerts about network status, they can also take action.

Pros:

• Google Maps integrated with the Web interface, allowing monitoring software to display
  geographical maps
• Functions of advanced maps for creating custom network views
• Real-time availability of up to a year of actual historic data, not aggregated data
• Integrated native Linux monitoring functions
• Monitoring of virtual environments, including VMware, HyperV, Xen and Amazon Cloud Watch
• Installation of reliable alarm system enabling alerts via e-mail, SMS, instant
  messenger, pager message, HTTP request, syslog, etc.
• A variety of new sensors and remote probes to monitor distributed systems, including
  xFlow sensors for monitoring via NetFlow or sFlow.
• Very easy setup, 
• broad  range of sensors,
• self-contained design

**I did not find any cons!

Spiceworks

Spiceworks is a network management and monitoring, Help Desk, PC inventory and software reporting solution for handling IT in small and medium-sized businesses.

Pros

● Fast installation
● Main dashboard completely configurable
● Easy to use monitoring console
● Active user community, with forums, ratings and reviews, how-tos and whitepapers
● Free
● Easy to install and configure for Windows environments
● “All in one” solution for Inventory, Monitoring, and Help Desk
● Great starting point for IT management

Cons

● On larger networks, performance can be slow
● Limited scalability
● Does not facilitate managing control of monitored devices
● Some initial device configuration is required to be recognized by Spiceworks
● VMWare and Unix systems not discovered nearly as easily as Windows
● Does not provide the same depth of monitoring and control as enterprise-level
   products

Inputs

If you want to try out an open-source software, which is absolutely free, you should opt for Zabbix. You can also try out the PRTG Network monitor as it is free for up to 30 sensors. Considering the fact that currently we do not have a lot of servers, you can opt for the PRTG monitor as it is much simpler than Zabbix with almost all the same features and actually much better GUI. Like Zabbix it also has excellent community support and once you feel that you need to add more sensors you can opt to pay for those using the PRTG Network monitor or go for Zabbix. The problem with softwares like Zabbix and Nagios is that they require a very steep learning curve and unless you devote a person for that purpose it would be really time (that implies money) consuming. So basically its just the same. I would suggest to give the PRTG Network Monitoring System a try.

Important links

PRTG Network Monitor download link : http://www.paessler.com/prtg/download
Zabbix Download link : http://www.zabbix.com/download.php

PRTG System Requirements : http://www.paessler.com/prtg/detailedrequirements
Zabbix Systems Requirements : http://www.zabbix.com/requirements.php

PRTG Support : http://www.paessler.com/support/manuals
Zabbix Support : http://www.zabbix.com/documentation.php

PRTG Community and Blog : http://www.paessler.com/blog
Zabbix Community and Blog : http://www.zabbix.com/community.php

Extended Feature Comparison of the Network Analyzer tools

Valuable Features:

Room for Improvement:

Use of Solution:

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?