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Graphite vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Graphite and Zabbix, two popular tools used for monitoring and collecting metrics in a website or application environment.

  1. Scalability and Architecture: Graphite is built on a scalable distributed architecture, where individual components can be deployed on separate machines. It uses a Whisper database for long-term storage of time-series data, and the Graphite web application provides a user-friendly interface for data visualization. On the other hand, Zabbix follows a centralized architecture with a single server responsible for collecting and storing metrics. While Zabbix can handle a large number of monitored devices, Graphite's distributed architecture allows it to handle massive amounts of data and scale horizontally more effectively.

  2. Data Collection and Supported Data Sources: Graphite primarily focuses on time-series data collection and storage. It supports various data sources, such as applications, network devices, and servers, and metrics can be sent to Graphite using its native Carbon protocol or via other methods like StatsD. In contrast, Zabbix offers a wider range of monitoring capabilities, including not only time-series data but also log files, SNMP devices, IPMI-enabled systems, and more. Zabbix provides pre-built agents and templates for collecting data from different sources, making it more versatile in terms of data collection.

  3. Alerting and Notification: Both Graphite and Zabbix offer alerting and notification features, but there are some differences in how they handle this functionality. Graphite relies on external tools or custom scripts to evaluate metrics and trigger alerting actions. Users need to set up their own alerting mechanisms based on defined thresholds or patterns. On the other hand, Zabbix has native support for alerting and notification. It allows users to configure triggers and actions for specific conditions and events, and notifications can be sent through various channels like email, SMS, or instant messaging.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Graphite has been around for a longer time and has a large and active community of users and contributors. It has a rich ecosystem with a wide range of integrations and extensions available. There are multiple third-party tools and libraries that work with Graphite, expanding its capabilities. Zabbix also has a strong community and ecosystem, but it may have a slightly smaller user base compared to Graphite. However, Zabbix provides a comprehensive set of features and built-in integrations, reducing the need for external tools in many cases.

  5. Ease of Setup and Configuration: Setting up Graphite can be a bit more involved compared to Zabbix. Graphite requires multiple components to be installed and configured, such as Carbon for data collection, Whisper for data storage, and the Graphite web application for visualization. Each component requires specific configuration files and dependencies. On the other hand, Zabbix provides an all-in-one package with a straightforward installation process. It includes the Zabbix server, front-end interface, and optional agents, allowing users to get started quickly with minimal configuration.

  6. Learning Curve and Usability: Graphite's learning curve can be steeper for users who are new to time-series databases and related concepts. While the Graphite web application provides a user-friendly interface for data visualization, understanding its query language and advanced features may require some effort. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more intuitive user interface and a lower learning curve, making it easier for users to navigate and configure the system. It provides a range of pre-built templates and monitoring configurations, simplifying the setup process for common use cases.

In summary, Graphite and Zabbix have distinct differences in terms of scalability and architecture, supported data sources, alerting and notification, community and ecosystem, ease of setup and configuration, as well as learning curve and usability. Choosing the right tool depends on specific requirements and preferences, with Graphite being a scalable and focused solution for time-series data, while Zabbix offers broader monitoring capabilities with easier setup and configuration.

Advice on Graphite and Zabbix
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 780K 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 · 565.3K 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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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 · 281.7K 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 · 279.4K 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 Graphite
Pros of Zabbix
  • 16
    Render any graph
  • 9
    Great functions to apply on timeseries
  • 8
    Well supported integrations
  • 6
    Includes event tracking
  • 3
    Rolling aggregation makes storage managable
  • 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 Graphite
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 Graphite?

    Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

    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 Graphite and Zabbix?
    Grafana
    Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
    Graphene
    Graphene is a Python library for building GraphQL schemas/types fast and easily.
    Pencil
    A web application microframework for Rust
    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.
    Kibana
    Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.
    See all alternatives