RRDtool vs Zabbix

Overview

RRDtool

Stacks14

Followers45

Votes6

GitHub Stars1.1K

Forks274

Zabbix

Stacks684

Followers981

Votes66

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.1K

RRDtool vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Differences between RRDtool and Zabbix

RRDtool and Zabbix are both popular tools used for monitoring and managing network systems. While they may have similar functionalities, there are key differences between them that set them apart.

Data Storage: RRDtool is primarily designed for storing and retrieval of time series data. It uses Round Robin Database (RRD) files to store data with fixed-size, consolidated data points over time. On the other hand, Zabbix stores its data in a relational database, providing more flexibility in storing and querying historical data.
Alerting and Notifications: Zabbix has a more robust alerting system compared to RRDtool. Zabbix allows users to define complex trigger conditions based on various parameters and send notifications through multiple channels such as email, SMS, and instant messaging. RRDtool, on the other hand, does not have built-in alerting capabilities, requiring integration with external tools for notifications.
User Interface: Zabbix provides a comprehensive web-based user interface that allows users to easily configure and monitor network systems. It offers detailed graphs, maps, and reports for a holistic view of the infrastructure. RRDtool, being a command-line tool, does not have a built-in user interface, requiring users to interact with it through scripts or third-party front-end applications.
Agent-based vs Agentless Monitoring: Zabbix uses a centralized agent-based approach for monitoring network systems. Zabbix agents need to be installed on each monitored host, providing detailed system information to the Zabbix server. RRDtool, on the other hand, is agentless and can collect data from multiple sources without the need for a dedicated agent on each host.
Integration and Extensibility: Zabbix supports a wide range of integration options, allowing users to collect data from various sources like SNMP, JMX, and IPMI. It also provides an API for custom integration and automation. RRDtool, although extensible through the use of scripts and plugins, has more limited integration options compared to Zabbix.
Scalability: Zabbix is known for its horizontal scalability, where multiple Zabbix server instances can be deployed to handle large-scale monitoring environments. On the other hand, RRDtool does not inherently support distributed architecture, making it less suitable for highly scalable deployments.

In summary, RRDtool is a specialized tool for storing and retrieving time-series data in a fixed-size database, while Zabbix provides a comprehensive monitoring solution with extensive features such as alerting, a user-friendly interface, and scalability.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on RRDtool, Zabbix

vivek

Jun 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

Centreon

Zabbix

Datadog

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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Comments

Detailed Comparison

RRDtool	Zabbix
RRDtool lets you log and analyze the data you gather from all kinds of data-sources (DS). The data analysis part of RRDtool is based on the ability to quickly generate graphical representations of the data values collected over a definable time period.	Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
-	Smart, Highly Automated Metric Collection; Advanced Problem Detection; Intelligent Alerting and Remediation
Statistics
GitHub Stars 1.1K	GitHub Stars 5.3K
GitHub Forks 274	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 14	Stacks 684
Followers 45	Followers 981
Votes 6	Votes 66
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Do one thing and do it well	Pros 21 Free 9 Alerts 5 Templates 5 Service/node/network discovery 4 Base metrics from the box Cons 5 The UI is in PHP 2 Puppet module is sluggish
Integrations
No integrations available	Slack Jira PagerDuty Grafana Ansible Skype Chef Bugzilla HipChat ServiceNow.com

What are some alternatives to RRDtool, 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.

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.

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.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

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

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

RRDtool vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Differences between RRDtool and Zabbix

RRDtool and Zabbix are both popular tools used for monitoring and managing network systems. While they may have similar functionalities, there are key differences between them that set them apart.

Data Storage: RRDtool is primarily designed for storing and retrieval of time series data. It uses Round Robin Database (RRD) files to store data with fixed-size, consolidated data points over time. On the other hand, Zabbix stores its data in a relational database, providing more flexibility in storing and querying historical data.
Alerting and Notifications: Zabbix has a more robust alerting system compared to RRDtool. Zabbix allows users to define complex trigger conditions based on various parameters and send notifications through multiple channels such as email, SMS, and instant messaging. RRDtool, on the other hand, does not have built-in alerting capabilities, requiring integration with external tools for notifications.
User Interface: Zabbix provides a comprehensive web-based user interface that allows users to easily configure and monitor network systems. It offers detailed graphs, maps, and reports for a holistic view of the infrastructure. RRDtool, being a command-line tool, does not have a built-in user interface, requiring users to interact with it through scripts or third-party front-end applications.
Agent-based vs Agentless Monitoring: Zabbix uses a centralized agent-based approach for monitoring network systems. Zabbix agents need to be installed on each monitored host, providing detailed system information to the Zabbix server. RRDtool, on the other hand, is agentless and can collect data from multiple sources without the need for a dedicated agent on each host.
Integration and Extensibility: Zabbix supports a wide range of integration options, allowing users to collect data from various sources like SNMP, JMX, and IPMI. It also provides an API for custom integration and automation. RRDtool, although extensible through the use of scripts and plugins, has more limited integration options compared to Zabbix.
Scalability: Zabbix is known for its horizontal scalability, where multiple Zabbix server instances can be deployed to handle large-scale monitoring environments. On the other hand, RRDtool does not inherently support distributed architecture, making it less suitable for highly scalable deployments.

RRDtool vs Zabbix

Overview

RRDtool vs Zabbix: What are the differences?