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Splunk vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Splunk vs Zabbix

Splunk and Zabbix are two popular tools used for monitoring and managing systems and infrastructure. While both offer similar functionalities, there are key differences between them.

  1. Data Collection and Processing: One notable difference between Splunk and Zabbix is in the way they handle data collection and processing. Splunk is built on a log-centric approach, where it collects and indexes log data from various sources, allowing users to search, analyze, and visualize this data. On the other hand, Zabbix focuses on monitoring and collecting metrics, providing real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities.

  2. Flexibility and Scalability: Splunk is known for its flexibility and scalability, allowing users to handle massive amounts of data and easily scale their deployments. It offers a wide range of plugins and APIs, enabling integration with various data sources and systems. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a simpler architecture and is more suitable for smaller to medium-sized environments.

  3. User Interface and Visualization: Splunk provides a user-friendly interface with powerful visualization capabilities. Its dashboards and charts allow users to analyze data and monitor system performance effectively. Zabbix, while offering visualization features, has a more basic interface and may require more configuration to achieve similar visualizations as Splunk.

  4. Alerting and Notifications: Both Splunk and Zabbix offer alerting and notification functionalities. Splunk's alerting system allows users to set up customizable alerts based on specific conditions or events. Zabbix also provides alerting capabilities but may require more manual configuration for intricate alerting scenarios.

  5. Community and Community Support: Splunk has a larger and more active community, providing extensive resources, plugins, and knowledge base articles. Zabbix also has a dedicated community, but it may not be as extensive as Splunk's. Splunk's community support is known to be strong and responsive.

  6. Licensing and Cost: Splunk offers both free and paid licensing options, with the paid version providing additional features and scalability. Zabbix, on the other hand, is open-source and free to use, making it a more cost-effective solution for organizations on a tight budget.

In summary, while both Splunk and Zabbix serve the purpose of system monitoring and management, Splunk stands out in terms of its log-centric approach, flexibility, scalability, and user-friendly interface. Zabbix, being open-source, provides a cost-effective solution with a simpler architecture suitable for smaller environments. Ultimately, the choice between Splunk and Zabbix depends on specific requirements, budget, and scalability needs of the organization.

Advice on Splunk 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 · 280.8K 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 · 278.5K 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 Splunk
Pros of Zabbix
  • 3
    API for searching logs, running reports
  • 3
    Alert system based on custom query results
  • 2
    Dashboarding on any log contents
  • 2
    Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing
  • 2
    Ability to style search results into reports
  • 2
    Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc
  • 2
    Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc
  • 2
    Rich GUI for searching live logs
  • 1
    Query any log as key-value pairs
  • 1
    Granular scheduling and time window support
  • 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 Splunk
Cons of Zabbix
  • 1
    Splunk query language rich so lots to learn
  • 5
    The UI is in PHP
  • 2
    Puppet module is sluggish

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