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Telegraf vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction Telegraf and Zabbix are both popular monitoring tools used to collect and analyze data for managing IT infrastructure. However, they have significant differences in their approach and capabilities.

  1. Architecture: Telegraf is an agent-based monitoring tool that collects data from various sources and sends it to different outputs. It follows a decentralized approach, where data collection and processing happen on the monitored devices. On the other hand, Zabbix follows a centralized architecture, where all monitoring processes occur on a central server, and agents are deployed on monitored devices to collect data. This difference in architecture affects scalability, resource consumption, and the ability to monitor distributed systems.

  2. Ease of Installation: Telegraf is known for its simplicity of installation, as it is designed to be lightweight and easy to deploy. It has a small footprint and does not require complex configurations. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more comprehensive installation process that involves setting up a central server, installing agents on monitored devices, and configuring various parameters. This difference makes Telegraf a preferred choice for quick and straightforward deployments.

  3. Extensibility and Integrations: Telegraf provides a wide range of "input plugins" that allow it to collect data from various sources such as system metrics, logs, API endpoints, and databases. It also offers "output plugins" to send data to different storage systems and visualization platforms. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more limited set of integrations out-of-the-box. While it offers flexibility through custom scripts and templates, extending its capabilities requires more development effort compared to Telegraf.

  4. Alerting and Notification: Telegraf focuses primarily on data collection and aggregation, with limited built-in alerting capabilities. It is often used in conjunction with other tools like InfluxDB and Grafana to build a complete monitoring and alerting stack. Zabbix, on the other hand, provides robust built-in alerting and notification features. It allows users to define complex alert criteria, notify multiple recipients, and escalate alerts based on specific conditions. This difference makes Zabbix a more self-contained solution for comprehensive monitoring and alerting needs.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Telegraf benefits from being part of the broader InfluxData ecosystem, which includes other powerful tools like InfluxDB (a time-series database) and Grafana (a visualization platform). It has an active community and extensive documentation that helps users troubleshoot issues and explore best practices. Zabbix, on the other hand, has its dedicated community and ecosystem. It has been around for a longer time and has a larger user base, resulting in a more mature ecosystem, extensive online resources, and a broad range of plugins and extensions.

  6. Setup and Configuration Complexity: Telegraf is designed to be easy to set up and configure, offering a straightforward configuration file format with simple syntax. It abstracts away much of the complexity of collecting and processing monitoring data. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more complex setup and configuration process. It requires users to define hosts, items, triggers, and other elements explicitly, making it more suitable for users who require fine-grained control over their monitoring setup.

In summary, Telegraf and Zabbix differ in their architecture, ease of installation, extensibility, alerting capabilities, community support, and setup complexity. Telegraf offers a lightweight agent-based approach with easy installation and a wide range of integrations, while Zabbix provides a centralized server-based architecture with comprehensive in-built alerting features and a mature community ecosystem.

Advice on Telegraf and Zabbix
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CentreonCentreon
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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 · 293.6K views
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ZabbixZabbix
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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
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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 · 291.1K views
Recommends
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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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KamonKamon
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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 Telegraf
Pros of Zabbix
  • 5
    One agent can work as multiple exporter with min hndlng
  • 5
    Cohesioned stack for monitoring
  • 2
    Open Source
  • 2
    Metrics
  • 1
    Supports custom plugins in any language
  • 1
    Many hundreds of 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 Telegraf
Cons of Zabbix
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 5
      The UI is in PHP
    • 2
      Puppet module is sluggish

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