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Munin vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will discuss the key differences between Munin and Zabbix.

  1. Monitoring Capabilities: Munin primarily focuses on monitoring resources like CPU, memory, disk space, and network usage through its lightweight monitoring approach. On the other hand, Zabbix offers a centralized monitoring system capable of monitoring a wide range of aspects including network devices, applications, databases, and user-defined parameters.

  2. Scalability and Flexibility: Zabbix is designed for large-scale environments and provides excellent scalability, allowing it to monitor thousands of devices and handle high-frequency updates. Munin, on the other hand, is more suitable for smaller environments as it lacks the scalability and flexibility to handle large-scale deployments.

  3. Monitoring Agents: Zabbix requires the installation of agents on the target systems to collect data, offering more comprehensive monitoring capabilities. In contrast, Munin utilizes a simpler agentless approach by connecting remotely to the target systems, making it easier to set up and manage, but with limited monitoring capabilities.

  4. Alerting System: Zabbix provides a robust alerting system that allows users to define triggers, receive notifications via various methods (email, SMS, etc.), and configure escalations. Munin, however, does not have an in-built alerting system and relies on third-party tools or scripts for generating alerts based on predefined thresholds.

  5. Graphing and Visualization: Munin comes with a basic set of graphs and visualizations by default, which are relatively easy to understand. Zabbix, on the other hand, offers more advanced graphing and visualization options, including custom graphs, trend lines, drill-down reports, and dashboards, providing more flexibility in data analysis.

  6. Ease of Use: Munin is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a preferred choice for beginners or users seeking a quick and straightforward monitoring solution. Conversely, Zabbix has a steeper learning curve due to its extensive features and complexity, making it more suitable for experienced users willing to invest time in its setup and configuration.

In summary, Munin is a lightweight, easy-to-use monitoring solution with limited capabilities, mainly focused on resource monitoring, while Zabbix offers a comprehensive, scalable, and flexible monitoring system with advanced features such as agent-based monitoring, extensive alerting capabilities, and advanced graphing and visualization options.

Advice on Munin and Zabbix
Needs advice
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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 · 280.1K 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 · 277.8K 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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Pros of Munin
Pros of Zabbix
  • 3
    Good defaults
  • 2
    Extremely fast to install
  • 2
    Alerts can trigger any command line program
  • 2
    Adheres to traditional Linux standards
  • 1
    Easy to write custom plugins
  • 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 Munin
Cons of Zabbix
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 5
      The UI is in PHP
    • 2
      Puppet module is sluggish

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Munin?

    Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

    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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Munin?
    What companies use Zabbix?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Munin or Zabbix.
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    What tools integrate with Munin?
    What tools integrate with Zabbix?

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    What are some alternatives to Munin and Zabbix?
    Cacti
    Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box.
    Nagios
    Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
    Ganglia
    It is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters.
    collectd
    collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you're at the right place, too.
    Monit
    It can monitor and manage distributed computer systems, conduct automatic maintenance and repair and execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.
    See all alternatives