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Zabbix is an open-source monitoring solution designed for real-time monitoring and management of IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services. Whilst Zabbix is a powerful monitoring tool that can be utilized for a range of use cases, the solution is primarily used for network monitoring.
Zabbix has numerous advantages that have led to its growth in popularity, but while it offers these benefits to organizations it isn’t always the perfect solution. A common factor that has led many organizations to believe it isn’t the tool for them is the steep learning curve required to operate Zabbix effectively. Zabbix is known for its complexity, making it difficult to use, configure, and maintain. As well as this, Zabbix is particularly resource-intensive, consuming significant resources on the monitored system. This high resource usage can negatively impact overall system performance and potentially lead to latency issues, making it less ideal for environments where resource efficiency is critical.
These drawbacks of Zabbix have led to many teams searching for alternative solutions. However, the process of finding the perfect tool for your organization can be difficult and time-consuming. So, to assist you with this, this article will outline the best Zabbix alternatives currently on the market to enable you to make an educated decision.
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Zabbix Alternatives
Paessler PRTG
The first tool included in our list of Zabbix alternatives is Paessler PRTG a Network Monitor that is a robust and user-friendly monitoring solution. PRTG offers comprehensive monitoring for networks, servers, and applications, with an intuitive interface and a wide range of pre-configured sensors. Key features of the solution include real-time monitoring, customizable dashboards, advanced alerting, and detailed reporting.
Nagios
Nagios, an open-source monitoring solution is often viewed as the main Zabbix alternative. It provides full-fledged monitoring of the network, servers, and applications, with an emphasis on scalability and high flexibility. The main features are real-time monitoring, extended alerting or notifications, different plugins, and extended report generation. Nagios supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring and can be configured easily into many other systems or devices.
Logit.io
Logit.io is a powerful, fully-featured observability platform that serves as a great Zabbix alternative due to its extensive network monitoring capabilities. Logit.io offers the best in class open source tools as hosted solutions, including Prometheus. Prometheus is renowned for being one of the leading open-source solutions for network device monitoring and alerting. The tool can be easily configured to scrape metrics and statistics from all of your network applications so that this data can be visualized, reported upon, and monitored.
With Logit.io, you can attain all the benefits of using Prometheus for network monitoring but without all the difficult and time-consuming configuration and maintenance as this will be handled by us. If you’re interested in finding out more about Logit.io’s capabilities feel free to contact us or begin exploring our platform for yourself with a 14-day free trial.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds is a comprehensive IT Monitoring and Management tool that provides high-end awareness through the visualization of network paths and correlating performance data of its NetPath and PerfStack tools. Its ease of use, richness in different functionalities, and faster integration across multiple IT systems make SolarWinds one of the favored choices in organizations for a multi-dimensional, strong, and technically feasible monitoring solution.
Centreon
Continuing with our list of Zabbix alternatives, another leading solution is Centreon, a SaaS IT monitoring platform. The solution enhances organizational operational performance by tracking application and infrastructure availability rates. It provides comprehensive reports and dashboards that effectively align IT metrics with business KPIs. Also, Centreon’s intelligent discovery and automation feature supports over 700 different assets, ranging from APIs to routers, enabling instant detection, connection, and integration updates.
Icinga
With Icinga, you can effectively observe and monitor your entire IT infrastructure in one place. This functionality helps reduce network downtime and uncover hidden issues affecting bandwidth, ensuring maximum productivity for your users. Whether your devices are connected through HP, Cisco, Juniper, or another vendor, it allows you to collect data on their throughput and utilization.
LogicMonitor
Another tool included in our list of Zabbix alternatives is LogicMonitor, a hybrid observability platform powered by AI. The solution offers over 2000 out-of-the-box integrations for top brands including Cisco, Juniper, and Meraki, allowing for autodiscovery of any device on any network. As well as this, with LogicMonitor you can utilize dynamic auto-generated topology maps to enable you to contextualize network traffic and alerts in real-time. Lastly, troubleshooting is faster due to end-to-end visibility with unified network logs, metrics, and intelligent alerting thresholds solving network issues at lightning speed.
Checkmk
Checkmk is an IT monitoring solution with network monitoring capabilities that lend itself to being an effective Zabbix alternative. The tool employs a rules-based approach for network monitoring configuration, which is particularly powerful when managing a large number of similar devices. This method contrasts with a template-based approach, where each 'sensor' needs individual configuration. Also, Checkmk has more than 2,000 preconfigured checks meaning it's likely to monitor any switch, router, or firewall you may have.
Datadog
Datadog has high network monitoring capabilities, making it particularly attractive as a Zabbix alternative. It provides real-time observability of your network performance, bandwidth usage, and traffic patterns in distributed environments. The tool offers crucial features including automated discovery, custom dashboards, advanced alerting with anomaly detection, and integration into cloud platforms and third-party tools.
LibreNMS
LibreNMS is an open-source network monitoring software. The solution is highly scalable due to the various network devices that can be connected via SNMP and have configurable alerting, graphing, and reporting. With numerous integrations available to other software through web interfaces, it offers a vibrant community interested in strong competition among organizations looking for a flexible, efficient network monitoring solution.
Observium
The next tool included in our list of Zabbix alternatives is Observium, a network monitoring and management platform. Observium features a web-based interface that enables users to monitor network status and performance metrics in real-time, along with access to historical data. As well as this, Observium supports a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Juniper, Dell, FreeBSD, Brocade, Netscaler, and NetApp.
Netdata
Netdata is a real-time infrastructure, application, container, and IoT device performance monitoring solution. Unlike Zabbix, Netdata pays closer attention to being user-friendly, with a real-time visualization solution that will provide immediate insights through intuitive and dynamic charts, deal for the user who desires instant rewarding, granular visibility into their systems.
Monit
Monit is a simple open-source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. This solution conducts automatic maintenance and repairs and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations. Also, Monit can be used to monitor general system resources on localhost such as overall CPU usage, Memory, Load Average, and Network Interfaces. Lastly, Monit offers the ability to track network connections to various servers, either on localhost or on remote hosts.
Sematext
The last tool included in our list of Zabbix alternatives is Sematext, a monitoring and alerting platform. Sematext’s network monitoring provides a real-time map of all your servers and containers. In addition to this, with Sematext’s all-in-one monitoring tool, you can cut out complexity in your monitoring tools and increase your team’s efficiency by identifying bottlenecks in real time. Lastly, you can get alerted on key issues before they turn into emergencies.
If you've enjoyed this article why not read The Top 8 Network Monitoring Tools or What is Network Monitoring next?