Barracuda Web Security Gateway vs. Zabbix

Barracuda Web Security Gateway is a secure solution. This solution offers advanced filtering for web content, application control, access control, network monitoring, and user authentication to control network access. It is easy to use, helps prevent access to harmful content. Therefore, I highly recommend the Barracuda Web Security Gateway to enhance your network security, secure remote administration, and approve and control application usage.

Incentivized

Because we spread out in different locations, we can't always know the status of our devices. Zabbix solves this issue for us. As soon as we see an alert that the remote site is down, we can solve it right away. I can't think of a scenario where it was less appropriate for us.

Incentivized

• It can integrate with active directory to place restrictions based on a specific user or group if required - or alternatively to allow a user/group to access more on the web if needed.
• The application blocking features have been especially useful in our enterprise, and there is a large number of applications & web applications available to block/allow as needed.

Incentivized

• Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
• Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
• Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software

Incentivized

• There are 2 different policies; authenticated and unauthenticated. Sometimes the filter does not pick up the user that is logged in. When this happens, that user could potentially access sites that would normally be blocked.
• Sometimes blocking one thing could block something you need. We had an instance where we use remote software. We block BitTorrent but for some reason, the filter was seeing this remote software as BitTorrent traffic. I got support on the line and we were eventually able to figure out a solution.
• We put in certain applications. One of them is supposed to be blocked but a lot of the time it doesn't get blocked.

Incentivized

• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

Incentivized

It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.

Incentivized

There are a lot of settings you can adjust. The web log is easy to use. If a user is having issues accessing a website, you can go in and see what's being blocked and why. After that, you can make adjustments fairly easy. The GUI is easy to navigate and updating the software is a simple click of a button.

Incentivized

Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.

Incentivized

Barracuda support is always available, 24/7. They are always friendly, supportive, and follow-up with anything they promise. Any ticket that is opened is touched constantly by the support team until it is remedied

The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.

Incentivized

We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.

Incentivized

Barracuda Web Filter is superior to the built-in content filters of any firewalls (even next gen) that we have encountered. It's a misconception that the built-in filtering on a SonicWALL or WatchGuard is enough. I don't believe that Barracuda has any direct competitors in this space that it's not head and shoulders above.

The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking up against any other apps in the web.

Incentivized

• We had several of our divisions that we thought needed to increase their internet bandwidth, due to decreased speed and productivity. After installing the Barracuda Web Security Gateway, we realized we had some abusive behavior going on with online activity. We set some controls and the bandwidth usage decreased by at least 30%, allowing us to maintain the current bandwidth and not spending more money.

• Zabbix has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.

Incentivized