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PRTG vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between PRTG and Zabbix, two popular network monitoring tools.

  1. Scalability: PRTG offers a more scalable solution compared to Zabbix. With its distributed monitoring architecture, PRTG allows for easy expansion and can handle large-scale networks without performance degradation. In contrast, Zabbix is better suited for smaller networks and may face limitations when monitoring a large number of devices.

  2. Ease of Use: PRTG provides a user-friendly interface with intuitive dashboards and customizable reports. It offers a quick and easy installation process, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced users. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve and requires more technical expertise to set up and configure.

  3. Alerting and Notifications: PRTG offers flexible alerting and notification options. It allows users to define custom alert triggers and notifications via email, SMS, or push notifications. Additionally, PRTG provides escalation mechanisms and acknowledges alerts, ensuring that critical issues are reported and resolved promptly. Zabbix also provides alerting capabilities, but its configuration and customization options are more complex compared to PRTG.

  4. Monitoring Capabilities: PRTG provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities for various network components, including servers, routers, switches, and virtual environments. It supports a wide range of protocols and vendors, making it versatile for monitoring different technologies. Zabbix, on the other hand, focuses more on monitoring servers and applications, with limited support for network devices.

  5. Integration and APIs: PRTG offers a rich set of APIs and integrations, allowing seamless integration with third-party systems and tools. It supports various programming languages and provides comprehensive documentation for integration purposes. Zabbix also offers APIs, but its integration capabilities are not as extensive as PRTG.

  6. Licensing Model: PRTG follows a commercial licensing model, offering a free version with limited features and a paid version with additional features and unlimited sensors. Zabbix, on the other hand, follows an open-source licensing model, providing all features and functionalities for free. However, the open-source version of Zabbix lacks some advanced features available in the commercial version.

In Summary, PRTG and Zabbix differ in scalability, ease of use, alerting and notifications, monitoring capabilities, integration and APIs, as well as licensing model.

Advice on PRTG 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 · 296.7K 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 · 294.1K 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 PRTG
Pros of Zabbix
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 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, ...)

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of PRTG
    Cons of Zabbix
    • 1
      Poor search capabilities
    • 1
      Graphs are static
    • 1
      Running on windows
    • 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 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.

    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 PRTG?
    What companies use Zabbix?
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    What tools integrate with PRTG?
    What tools integrate with Zabbix?

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    What are some alternatives to PRTG and Zabbix?
    Solarwinds
    Developed by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today's dynamic IT environments, SolarWinds has a deep connection to the IT community.
    Nagios
    Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
    LogicMonitor
    LogicMonitor provides the end-to-end visibility needed to maintain the performance and availability of business applications. It leverages automation and built-in intelligence to monitor today's complex and distributed infrastructures.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    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