Elasticsearch vs Prometheus vs Zabbix

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Elasticsearch

34K
26.5K
+ 1
1.6K
Prometheus

4.1K
3.8K
+ 1
239
Zabbix

669
965
+ 1
66

Elasticsearch vs Prometheus vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Zabbix

Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Zabbix are three popular tools used for monitoring and analytics. While they all serve similar purposes, there are some key differences between them.

1. Data Storage and Querying Capabilities: Elasticsearch is a highly scalable search and analytics engine built on top of the Apache Lucene library. It excels at storing, searching, and analyzing large volumes of structured and unstructured data. On the other hand, Prometheus is specifically designed for monitoring and time series data, making it ideal for collecting and querying metrics. Zabbix, meanwhile, is more of a traditional network monitoring tool that provides a centralized platform for collecting and analyzing data from various sources.

2. Data Model and Collection Methods: Elasticsearch and Prometheus have different data models. Elasticsearch stores data in a hierarchical structure of indices, types, and documents, while Prometheus uses a pull-based model where it scrapes metrics from various endpoints. Zabbix, on the other hand, follows a hybrid approach and supports both passive and active monitoring methods to collect data from different devices.

3. Alerting and Notification Capabilities: While all three tools support alerting and notifications, they differ in their approaches. Elasticsearch provides the foundation for building custom alerting systems based on its powerful query capabilities. Prometheus has a built-in alerting system that allows users to define rules and send notifications via various channels. Zabbix, being a comprehensive monitoring solution, offers advanced alerting features such as flexible trigger dependencies and escalation scenarios.

4. Distributed Monitoring and Scalability: Elasticsearch and Prometheus are designed to be distributed and scalable, allowing the addition of more nodes to handle increased data volumes and workloads. Elasticsearch leverages its distributed architecture to achieve high availability and fault tolerance. Prometheus, on the other hand, uses a federation model to aggregate data from multiple instances. Zabbix, while it supports distributed monitoring, has limitations in terms of scalability compared to the other two tools.

5. Monitoring Types and Integrations: Prometheus and Zabbix have broader support for infrastructure and application monitoring compared to Elasticsearch. Prometheus focuses on time series data from systems and services, with extensive integrations available for cloud-native technologies. Zabbix, being a comprehensive network monitoring tool, supports monitoring various protocols, devices, and applications. Elasticsearch, although capable of monitoring, is more commonly used for log and event data analysis.

6. Ease of Use and Learning Curve: In terms of ease of use, Elasticsearch and Prometheus can have a steeper learning curve compared to Zabbix. Elasticsearch and Prometheus require some level of configuration and setup, and a good understanding of query syntax or configuration files. Zabbix, on the other hand, provides a user-friendly web interface and pre-configured templates, making it easier for users to get started quickly.

In summary, Elasticsearch is best suited for large-scale search and analytics use cases, Prometheus is ideal for time series metrics monitoring, and Zabbix excels in network monitoring with its comprehensive features and ease of use.

Advice on Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Zabbix
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 784K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 569.3K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

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Needs advice
on
CentreonCentreon
and
ZabbixZabbix

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

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Replies (4)
Geoffrey Timmerman
Systems Engineer at Simac · | 6 upvotes · 282.9K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix
at

I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.

No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.

To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.

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Recommends
on
CentreonCentreon

Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews  

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muutech
at Muutech Monitoring Solutions, S.L. · | 3 upvotes · 280.6K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix

We highly recommend Zabbix. We have used it to build our own monitoring product (available on cloud -like datadog- or on premise with support) because of its flexibility and extendability. It can be easily integrated with the powerful dashboarding and data aggregation of Grafana, so it is perfect. All configuration is done via web and templates, so it scales well and can be distributed via proxies. I think there also more companies providing consultancy in Zabbix (like ours) than Centreon and community is much wider. Also Zabbix roadmap and focus (compatibility with Elasticsearch, Prometheus, TimescaleDB) is really really good.

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Recommends
on
KamonKamon
at

Hi Vivek, what's your stack? If huge monitoring bills are your concern and if you’re using a number of JVM languages, or mostly Scala / Akka, and would like “one tool to monitor them all”, Kamon might be the friendliest choice to go for.

Kamon APM’s major benefit is it comes with a built-in dashboard for the most important metrics to monitor, taking the pain of figuring out what to monitor and building your own dashboards for weeks out of the monitoring.

https://kamon.io/apm/

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Rana Usman Shahid
Chief Technology Officer at TechAvanza · | 6 upvotes · 369.7K views
Needs advice
on
AlgoliaAlgoliaElasticsearchElasticsearch
and
FirebaseFirebase

Hey everybody! (1) I am developing an android application. I have data of around 3 million record (less than a TB). I want to save that data in the cloud. Which company provides the best cloud database services that would suit my scenario? It should be secured, long term useable, and provide better services. I decided to use Firebase Realtime database. Should I stick with Firebase or are there any other companies that provide a better service?

(2) I have the functionality of searching data in my app. Same data (less than a TB). Which search solution should I use in this case? I found Elasticsearch and Algolia search. It should be secure and fast. If any other company provides better services than these, please feel free to suggest them.

Thank you!

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Replies (2)
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 8 upvotes · 274.6K views
Recommends
on
AlgoliaAlgolia

Hi Rana, good question! From my Firebase experience, 3 million records is not too big at all, as long as the cost is within reason for you. With Firebase you will be able to access the data from anywhere, including an android app, and implement fine-grained security with JSON rules. The real-time-ness works perfectly. As a fully managed database, Firebase really takes care of everything. The only thing to watch out for is if you need complex query patterns - Firestore (also in the Firebase family) can be a better fit there.

To answer question 2: the right answer will depend on what's most important to you. Algolia is like Firebase is that it is fully-managed, very easy to set up, and has great SDKs for Android. Algolia is really a full-stack search solution in this case, and it is easy to connect with your Firebase data. Bear in mind that Algolia does cost money, so you'll want to make sure the cost is okay for you, but you will save a lot of engineering time and never have to worry about scale. The search-as-you-type performance with Algolia is flawless, as that is a primary aspect of its design. Elasticsearch can store tons of data and has all the flexibility, is hosted for cheap by many cloud services, and has many users. If you haven't done a lot with search before, the learning curve is higher than Algolia for getting the results ranked properly, and there is another learning curve if you want to do the DevOps part yourself. Both are very good platforms for search, Algolia shines when buliding your app is the most important and you don't want to spend many engineering hours, Elasticsearch shines when you have a lot of data and don't mind learning how to run and optimize it.

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Mike Endale
Recommends
on
Cloud FirestoreCloud Firestore

Rana - we use Cloud Firestore at our startup. It handles many million records without any issues. It provides you the same set of features that the Firebase Realtime Database provides on top of the indexing and security trims. The only thing to watch out for is to make sure your Cloud Functions have proper exception handling and there are no infinite loop in the code. This will be too costly if not caught quickly.

For search; Algolia is a great option, but cost is a real consideration. Indexing large number of records can be cost prohibitive for most projects. Elasticsearch is a solid alternative, but requires a little additional work to configure and maintain if you want to self-host.

Hope this helps.

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 713.3K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Decisions about Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Zabbix
Long Nguyen
Engineering Director at Ecommerce Startup · | 2 upvotes · 7.4K views

Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Prometheus, also have APM in Elasticsearch, for all incidents trigger we route to Opsgenie. Kubernetes is for Deployment, RabbitMQ is for Eventbus, Golang in Backend and Postgresql for Database.

We use Holistics to log all segmentation for our tracker.

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Pros of Elasticsearch
Pros of Prometheus
Pros of Zabbix
  • 327
    Powerful api
  • 315
    Great search engine
  • 230
    Open source
  • 214
    Restful
  • 199
    Near real-time search
  • 97
    Free
  • 84
    Search everything
  • 54
    Easy to get started
  • 45
    Analytics
  • 26
    Distributed
  • 6
    Fast search
  • 5
    More than a search engine
  • 3
    Highly Available
  • 3
    Awesome, great tool
  • 3
    Great docs
  • 3
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Fast
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Great customer support
  • 2
    Intuitive API
  • 2
    Great piece of software
  • 2
    Reliable
  • 2
    Potato
  • 2
    Nosql DB
  • 2
    Document Store
  • 1
    Not stable
  • 1
    Scalability
  • 1
    Open
  • 1
    Github
  • 1
    Elaticsearch
  • 1
    Actively developing
  • 1
    Responsive maintainers on GitHub
  • 1
    Ecosystem
  • 1
    Easy to get hot data
  • 0
    Community
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring
  • 21
    Free
  • 9
    Alerts
  • 5
    Service/node/network discovery
  • 5
    Templates
  • 4
    Base metrics from the box
  • 3
    Multi-dashboards
  • 3
    SMS/Email/Messenger alerts
  • 2
    Grafana plugin available
  • 2
    Supports Graphs ans screens
  • 2
    Support proxies (for monitoring remote branches)
  • 1
    Perform website checking (response time, loading, ...)
  • 1
    API available for creating own apps
  • 1
    Templates free available (Zabbix Share)
  • 1
    Works with multiple databases
  • 1
    Advanced integrations
  • 1
    Supports multiple protocols/agents
  • 1
    Complete Logs Report
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Supports large variety of Operating Systems
  • 1
    Supports JMX (Java, Tomcat, Jboss, ...)

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Cons of Elasticsearch
Cons of Prometheus
Cons of Zabbix
  • 7
    Resource hungry
  • 6
    Diffecult to get started
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 4
    Hard to keep stable at large scale
  • 12
    Just for metrics
  • 6
    Bad UI
  • 6
    Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
  • 4
    Not easy to configure and use
  • 3
    Supports only active agents
  • 2
    Written in Go
  • 2
    TLS is quite difficult to understand
  • 2
    Requires multiple applications and tools
  • 1
    Single point of failure
  • 5
    The UI is in PHP
  • 2
    Puppet module is sluggish

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

What is Zabbix?

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

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What are some alternatives to Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Zabbix?
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Solr
Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.
Lucene
Lucene Core, our flagship sub-project, provides Java-based indexing and search technology, as well as spellchecking, hit highlighting and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities.
MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
Algolia
Our mission is to make you a search expert. Push data to our API to make it searchable in real time. Build your dream front end with one of our web or mobile UI libraries. Tune relevance and get analytics right from your dashboard.
See all alternatives