Telegraf vs Zabbix

Overview

Zabbix

Stacks684

Followers981

Votes66

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.1K

Telegraf

Stacks289

Followers321

Votes16

GitHub Stars16.4K

Forks5.7K

Telegraf vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction Telegraf and Zabbix are both popular monitoring tools used to collect and analyze data for managing IT infrastructure. However, they have significant differences in their approach and capabilities.

Architecture: Telegraf is an agent-based monitoring tool that collects data from various sources and sends it to different outputs. It follows a decentralized approach, where data collection and processing happen on the monitored devices. On the other hand, Zabbix follows a centralized architecture, where all monitoring processes occur on a central server, and agents are deployed on monitored devices to collect data. This difference in architecture affects scalability, resource consumption, and the ability to monitor distributed systems.
Ease of Installation: Telegraf is known for its simplicity of installation, as it is designed to be lightweight and easy to deploy. It has a small footprint and does not require complex configurations. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more comprehensive installation process that involves setting up a central server, installing agents on monitored devices, and configuring various parameters. This difference makes Telegraf a preferred choice for quick and straightforward deployments.
Extensibility and Integrations: Telegraf provides a wide range of "input plugins" that allow it to collect data from various sources such as system metrics, logs, API endpoints, and databases. It also offers "output plugins" to send data to different storage systems and visualization platforms. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more limited set of integrations out-of-the-box. While it offers flexibility through custom scripts and templates, extending its capabilities requires more development effort compared to Telegraf.
Alerting and Notification: Telegraf focuses primarily on data collection and aggregation, with limited built-in alerting capabilities. It is often used in conjunction with other tools like InfluxDB and Grafana to build a complete monitoring and alerting stack. Zabbix, on the other hand, provides robust built-in alerting and notification features. It allows users to define complex alert criteria, notify multiple recipients, and escalate alerts based on specific conditions. This difference makes Zabbix a more self-contained solution for comprehensive monitoring and alerting needs.
Community and Ecosystem: Telegraf benefits from being part of the broader InfluxData ecosystem, which includes other powerful tools like InfluxDB (a time-series database) and Grafana (a visualization platform). It has an active community and extensive documentation that helps users troubleshoot issues and explore best practices. Zabbix, on the other hand, has its dedicated community and ecosystem. It has been around for a longer time and has a larger user base, resulting in a more mature ecosystem, extensive online resources, and a broad range of plugins and extensions.
Setup and Configuration Complexity: Telegraf is designed to be easy to set up and configure, offering a straightforward configuration file format with simple syntax. It abstracts away much of the complexity of collecting and processing monitoring data. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more complex setup and configuration process. It requires users to define hosts, items, triggers, and other elements explicitly, making it more suitable for users who require fine-grained control over their monitoring setup.

In summary, Telegraf and Zabbix differ in their architecture, ease of installation, extensibility, alerting capabilities, community support, and setup complexity. Telegraf offers a lightweight agent-based approach with easy installation and a wide range of integrations, while Zabbix provides a centralized server-based architecture with comprehensive in-built alerting features and a mature community ecosystem.

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Advice on Zabbix, Telegraf

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

Zabbix	Telegraf
Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.	It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.
Smart, Highly Automated Metric Collection; Advanced Problem Detection; Intelligent Alerting and Remediation	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 5.3K	GitHub Stars 16.4K
GitHub Forks 1.1K	GitHub Forks 5.7K
Stacks 684	Stacks 289
Followers 981	Followers 321
Votes 66	Votes 16
Pros & Cons
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	Pros 5 Cohesioned stack for monitoring 5 One agent can work as multiple exporter with min hndlng 2 Metrics 2 Open Source 1 Many hundreds of plugins
Integrations
Slack Jira PagerDuty Grafana Ansible Skype Chef Bugzilla HipChat ServiceNow.com	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Zabbix, Telegraf?

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

Telegraf vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Architecture: Telegraf is an agent-based monitoring tool that collects data from various sources and sends it to different outputs. It follows a decentralized approach, where data collection and processing happen on the monitored devices. On the other hand, Zabbix follows a centralized architecture, where all monitoring processes occur on a central server, and agents are deployed on monitored devices to collect data. This difference in architecture affects scalability, resource consumption, and the ability to monitor distributed systems.
Ease of Installation: Telegraf is known for its simplicity of installation, as it is designed to be lightweight and easy to deploy. It has a small footprint and does not require complex configurations. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more comprehensive installation process that involves setting up a central server, installing agents on monitored devices, and configuring various parameters. This difference makes Telegraf a preferred choice for quick and straightforward deployments.
Extensibility and Integrations: Telegraf provides a wide range of "input plugins" that allow it to collect data from various sources such as system metrics, logs, API endpoints, and databases. It also offers "output plugins" to send data to different storage systems and visualization platforms. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more limited set of integrations out-of-the-box. While it offers flexibility through custom scripts and templates, extending its capabilities requires more development effort compared to Telegraf.
Alerting and Notification: Telegraf focuses primarily on data collection and aggregation, with limited built-in alerting capabilities. It is often used in conjunction with other tools like InfluxDB and Grafana to build a complete monitoring and alerting stack. Zabbix, on the other hand, provides robust built-in alerting and notification features. It allows users to define complex alert criteria, notify multiple recipients, and escalate alerts based on specific conditions. This difference makes Zabbix a more self-contained solution for comprehensive monitoring and alerting needs.
Community and Ecosystem: Telegraf benefits from being part of the broader InfluxData ecosystem, which includes other powerful tools like InfluxDB (a time-series database) and Grafana (a visualization platform). It has an active community and extensive documentation that helps users troubleshoot issues and explore best practices. Zabbix, on the other hand, has its dedicated community and ecosystem. It has been around for a longer time and has a larger user base, resulting in a more mature ecosystem, extensive online resources, and a broad range of plugins and extensions.
Setup and Configuration Complexity: Telegraf is designed to be easy to set up and configure, offering a straightforward configuration file format with simple syntax. It abstracts away much of the complexity of collecting and processing monitoring data. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a more complex setup and configuration process. It requires users to define hosts, items, triggers, and other elements explicitly, making it more suitable for users who require fine-grained control over their monitoring setup.

Telegraf vs Zabbix

Overview