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Icinga vs Zabbix: What are the differences?
Introduction
Icinga and Zabbix are both popular open-source monitoring solutions that help organizations monitor their IT infrastructure.
Key Differences between Icinga and Zabbix
Architecture and Scalability: Icinga follows a distributed architecture, allowing for higher scalability and fault tolerance. It supports a master/satellite setup where multiple satellites can be deployed for distributed monitoring. On the other hand, Zabbix follows a centralized architecture, where a single server performs all the monitoring activities. While Zabbix can handle moderate-sized environments well, Icinga excels in large-scale deployments with multiple monitoring instances.
Configuration Flexibility: Icinga provides much more flexibility in terms of configuration. It uses a flexible and extensible configuration language that allows users to define custom monitoring checks and create more complex monitoring scenarios. Zabbix, on the other hand, offers a simpler configuration approach with a user-friendly web interface, making it easier to set up for less experienced users.
User Interface: When it comes to the user interface, Zabbix offers a more polished and modern-looking interface out of the box. It provides advanced visualization and graphing capabilities, making it easier to analyze monitoring data. Icinga, while functional, may require additional customization or integration with third-party tools for a more visually appealing and comprehensive user interface.
Integration and Ecosystem: Icinga has strong integration capabilities with other systems and devices through its extensive ecosystem of plugins and addons. It supports a wide range of integration options, including SNMP, database monitoring, and messaging systems. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a rich ecosystem of integrations as well but may have a more limited selection compared to Icinga.
Notifications and Alerting: Both Icinga and Zabbix offer notifications and alerting capabilities, allowing users to receive alerts when an issue is detected. However, Icinga provides more advanced and customizable notification options, allowing users to define complex notification workflows and escalation paths. Zabbix offers a more straightforward notification setup, which may be sufficient for simpler monitoring scenarios.
Community Support and Development: Icinga has a vibrant and active community that contributes to its development and provides support to users. It has regular releases and updates, ensuring that bug fixes and new features are quickly addressed. Zabbix also has an active community but may not have the same level of widespread community support and development as Icinga.
In Summary, Icinga offers a distributed architecture with high scalability, configuration flexibility, and advanced notification options, while Zabbix provides a user-friendly interface, strong visualization capabilities, and a more polished out-of-the-box experience. Both solutions have their strengths and weaknesses, making them suitable for different monitoring requirements.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
- free open source
- modern interface and architecture
- large community
- extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point. That's why Icinga started first as a fork, not with Icinga2 it is completely built from scratch but backward-compatible with Nagios plugins. Now it has reached a state with which I am confident.
Pros of Icinga
Pros of Zabbix
- Free21
- Alerts9
- Service/node/network discovery5
- Templates5
- Base metrics from the box4
- Multi-dashboards3
- SMS/Email/Messenger alerts3
- Grafana plugin available2
- Supports Graphs ans screens2
- Support proxies (for monitoring remote branches)2
- Perform website checking (response time, loading, ...)1
- API available for creating own apps1
- Templates free available (Zabbix Share)1
- Works with multiple databases1
- Advanced integrations1
- Supports multiple protocols/agents1
- Complete Logs Report1
- Open source1
- Supports large variety of Operating Systems1
- Supports JMX (Java, Tomcat, Jboss, ...)1
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Cons of Icinga
Cons of Zabbix
- The UI is in PHP5
- Puppet module is sluggish2