ManageEngine Site24x7 vs. Zabbix

I have tried other tools (PRTG etc) in the past, and switched from US monitor to [Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring], for all the built-in features and ability to implement by using with or without the agents deployed (ip discovery LAN). This is one tool that encompasses the entire organization and allows that single pane of glass feel (NOC screen view) for an accurate virtual snapshot of your entire organization, either cloud and/or LAN.

Incentivized

Because we spread out in different locations, we can't always know the status of our devices. Zabbix solves this issue for us. As soon as we see an alert that the remote site is down, we can solve it right away. I can't think of a scenario where it was less appropriate for us.

Incentivized

• Alerts: Site24x7 can be configured to send alerts in all sorts of ways, from email, to text messages, to even direct automated phone calls.
• Internal monitoring: An agent installed on one or more machines can monitor internal connectivity to other network devices. This means if connectivity to a server goes down, we often know about it before users alert us.
• External monitoring: Site24x7 also watched our websites and sends alerts if they're unreachable. It uses multiple locations to do so, which means if there's a partial network outage in some part of the country, we know who is affected.

Incentivized

• Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
• Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
• Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software

Incentivized

• I wish the advanced monitors were not so expensive.
• It is a cloud solution, so it is necessary to open up outbound ports in all security zones.
• If you lose outbound internet service, all your internal servers will throw alarms and life gets extremely noisy.

Incentivized

• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

Incentivized

It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.

Incentivized

Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.

Incentivized

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

Incentivized

The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.

Incentivized

We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.

Incentivized

Site24x7 [All-in-One Monitoring] has some similarities to ThousandEyes. Especially in the troubleshooting aspect where both offer Web performance waterfall charts to analyze the issue better. Both have cloud-based servers globally that allow to determine performance on the Internet. Site24x7 has more features available so we selected it instead.

Incentivized

The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking up against any other apps in the web.

Incentivized

• Positivity wise, we're spending a third of what we were on our website monitoring, this has allowed us to focus funding elsewhere (namely SolarWinds).
• We have enhanced our core monitoring by now also being able to provide better coverage, whereas we were handicapped with our previous supplier due to the scaling costs of multi-step transactions.
• The general feeling from our IT staff is that the platform is not great, which obviously reduces confidence in the ability for the platform to provide accurate monitoring data for our websites.

Incentivized

• Zabbix has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.

Incentivized