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Observium vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

Observium and Zabbix are both network monitoring tools that provide valuable insight into the performance and availability of network devices. While they share similar goals, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Ease of Use: Observium shines in terms of ease of use, providing a straightforward and user-friendly interface. Its emphasis on simplicity makes it an excellent choice for small to medium-sized networks. On the other hand, Zabbix offers more comprehensive features and customization options, but it requires a steeper learning curve.

  2. Scalability: Zabbix is particularly suitable for large-scale environments due to its ability to monitor thousands of devices simultaneously. It boasts a distributed architecture and supports multiple monitoring agents, making it highly scalable. Observium, while still scalable, might face limitations in handling large networks and may require additional resources.

  3. Alerting and Notification: Zabbix excels in providing advanced alerting and notification features. It supports various alerting methods, including email, SMS, and mobile push notifications. Observium, although it offers basic alerting capabilities, may require third-party integrations or additional configurations for more advanced notifications.

  4. Device Support: Observium focuses primarily on network devices, making it an ideal choice for network administrators. It provides extensive support for network equipment manufacturers, including Cisco, Juniper, and HP. In contrast, Zabbix offers broader support for different types of devices, such as servers, applications, and virtual machines, making it more versatile for monitoring various aspects of an IT infrastructure.

  5. Community and Documentation: Zabbix benefits from a large and active community, contributing to regular updates, numerous integrations, and extensive documentation. This vibrant community ensures quick bug fixes, feature enhancements, and reliable support. Observium, while featuring an active community, may have a slightly smaller user base, resulting in fewer available resources and community-driven plugins.

  6. Pricing and Licensing: Observium provides a free community edition, but its full version requires a commercial license. Zabbix, on the other hand, is fully open-source, allowing users to benefit from all its features without any licensing fees. This difference in licensing models can be a critical factor for organizations with strict budget constraints.

In Summary, Observium and Zabbix differ in terms of ease of use, scalability, alerting and notification capabilities, device support, community and documentation, as well as pricing and licensing models. Choosing between the two depends on the specific needs and requirements of the network monitoring project.

Advice on Observium and Zabbix
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 · 280.4K 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 · 278.1K 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 Observium
Pros of Zabbix
  • 1
    Modern Graphs
  • 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 Observium
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

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Observium?

    It is a low-maintenance auto-discovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems

    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 Observium?
    What companies use Zabbix?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Observium or Zabbix.
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    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Observium?
    What tools integrate with Zabbix?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to Observium and Zabbix?
    PRTG
    It can monitor and classify system conditions like bandwidth usage or uptime and collect statistics from miscellaneous hosts as switches, routers, servers and other devices and applications.
    Nagios
    Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
    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.
    LibreNMS
    It is an auto-discovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP based network monitoring which includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Linux, FreeBSD, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP and many more.
    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.
    See all alternatives