Graylog vs. Zabbix

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Graylog
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Graylog, headquartered in Houston, offers their eponymous platform for centralized log management that helps users find meaning in data faster so as to take action immediately. Graylog is available via Enterprise and Cloud plans, but also has a Small Business Plan, and an Open (free) plan with limited features.N/A
Zabbix
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.N/A
Pricing
GraylogZabbix
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GraylogZabbix
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GraylogZabbix
Considered Both Products
Graylog
Chose Graylog
Azure Monitor is not exactly what I mean, but I couldn't find Azure Application Insights. Anyway, for a large organization, Azure makes more sense than using Graylog because a lot of logging will already be inside Azure. And you don't want to have two "central" logging …
Chose Graylog
We use the free edition, because it is free and open source. We evaluated numerous other products, but we decided to go down the Graylog track because of initial costs. While the competition (Splunk, AlienVault, etc.) are very good products and come highly recommended, it …
Chose Graylog
In terms of log aggregation, the free product fully stacks up with the competitors listed. Full control over the data ingests for flexible configuration. Graylog even better on that front than Alienvault USM because you cannot configure the variable mapping. We haven't used …
Chose Graylog
Graylog does what other similar products that cost more do, but the more expansive one typically has more features or are multiple products wrapped in one. We went with Graylog because it does everything we need it too, and the price was less than other and fit into our budget. …
Chose Graylog
We previously used Syslog(-ng) and considered moving to the Logstash with Kibana as part of the standard ELK stack as we are consumers of ELK in other scenarios, but we determined that maintaining a distributed Graylog system was going to require less work overtime for our main …
Chose Graylog
Graylog provides some great functionality for free. There are some more premium products that would handle more logs and would be a little easier to configure.
Zabbix
Chose Zabbix
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 …
Chose Zabbix
As I have mentioned before, its free, open source, very customizable and easy to use.
I think anybody with minimum networking or computer knowledge can watch tutorials and implement this solution easily.
Also it has great community support and forums
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix has no financial cost, PRTG is very expensive but just as impressive capability wise.
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix is very easy to configure and this tool provides a more active alert system. We have evaluated ipMonitor and CloudWatch but the scope for sending alerts is very limited and this tool is very efficient in sending alerts through emails, MS Teams, and even on SMS. We are …
Chose Zabbix
We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process.
Zabbix is a way more flexible and has …
Chose Zabbix
It's much easier to get the trained specialists that have experience with this tool in our country.
Chose Zabbix
We're using Munin in parallel to Zabbix, mostly out of legacy reasons. While Munin in the version used here only allows static graphs through image-files, Zabbix clearly wins here with the option to zoom in and out.
I used Nagios many years ago and it was quite similar to …
Chose Zabbix
Although we still use Cisco Prime for network devices, when comparing Zabbix with Nagios, for example, you see that Zabbix is more robust, stable, easy to deploy and has an enterprise focus that other tools don't have. Also, the fact that the Zabbix community is very active is …
Chose Zabbix
Most of the SolarWinds are separated out, whereas Zabbix includes templates and capabilities for all of them out of the box. Other solutions listed include most or all of them to varying degrees as well.

New Relic is more for Application Monitoring, but the New Relic …
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix was adopted in our framework due to the value, the hardware requirements, the knowledge we had available and the vast documentation on the internet.
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix is a great, free solution. While not everything is discovered and configured out of the box, it is a powerful tool that allows for complete customization to what your organization needs as far as a monitoring solution. We've invested the time to make Zabbix powerful, …
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix was much better at handling traditional systems, and in ease of customization, both in the system itself, and customizing data sources, such as adding deep MySQL or JMX integrations. It's very good for organizing large-scale (hundreds or thousands of servers) systems; …
Chose Zabbix
I personally prefer Zabbix over any other monitoring software that I have ever tried. Zabbix is so customizable that if there is a feature I need, I can easily implement it. I can then add that feature to a template in no time and have it applied to hundreds, or even thousands, …
Chose Zabbix
More extensive and customizable than SaaS solutions. Much less learning curve than Nagios. Cost is very much lower than SaaS monitoring especially at scales over 1000 hosts ($15,000/month for SaaS!!) Templating systems allows for easy management and monitoring of groups of …
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix is cost effective maybe and certainly a good tool but not the best. The other ones have features that Zabbix is missing and we use couple of them.
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix had the best support for the devices I initially had in my network, its ability to adapt and change has made it my Swiss Army knife of monitoring tools. While it could benefit greatly from a moderated zabbix community, its support from the open source community has …
Chose Zabbix
Nagios has some advantages over Zabbix like "flapping" detection and multiple alert levels - Error, Warning and OK.
However, the disadvantages of Nagios like needing an addon (NRPE) to monitor remote system internals (open files, running processes, memory, etc), no charting of …
Chose Zabbix
Nagios will always be at or near the top, but I really like how sleek Zabbix is. Also, once it's up and running its really helps keep things in order for you and your customers. As for PandoraFMS, it would have beat out Zabbix, but the documentation on PandoraFMS is really …
Chose Zabbix
The choice was made about 6 years ago, but nothing recent has called that into question. I don't really remember the details of the original choice.
Chose Zabbix
I have had feedback that Splunk is a more out-of-the-box solution. With some fine tuning, it is possible to get the same robust functionality from a Logstash and Zabbix integration. The setup is more taxing, but you avoid paying the costly Splunk fees. So it all really depends …
Chose Zabbix
I'm mostly familiar with Zabbix, but I've also started working with OpenNMS more recently. It appears that they're very comparable, the major difference being that OpenNMS supports SNMP Traps natively and can import MIBs which I was never able to figure out with Zabbix. Like …
Chose Zabbix
Well, I am not a decision-maker here, but I believe Zabbix has been adopted as a default choice to be integrated with Nokia OpenStack because of its simplicity of usage & other products were not matured at that time. Single GUI can be used for infrastructure as well as workload …
Best Alternatives
GraylogZabbix
Small Businesses
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
Score 8.9 out of 10
ConnectWise Automate
ConnectWise Automate
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Logz.io
Logz.io
Score 7.0 out of 10
Icinga
Icinga
Score 7.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
ScienceLogic SL1
ScienceLogic SL1
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GraylogZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
3.6
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GraylogZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
If you already have a basic understanding of Elasticsearch and/or MongoDB, Graylog will be a great fit when it comes to log aggregation. It will be a decent option even if you don't have any experience but have the time and willingness to roll up your sleeves that learning those tools will require. Graylog supports plugins to extend functionality for things like SNMP traps, telemetry collection, and solar flares. As is the case with most software with plugins, if the core functionality for which you are looking (i.e. not logging) is based on a plugin, Graylog probably isn't for you. The majority of the plugins in the marketplace are developed by third-parties looking to solve their specific use case so bug fixes and new features are not a given.
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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.
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Pros
  • The free edition is extraordinarily powerful.
  • Log searching is quick.
  • The web interface is sleek, and the install is relatively quick.
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  • 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
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Cons
  • The graphs and visualizations are limited on the dashboard if there were more options it would be better for different kinds of data.
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  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
From a product perspective, it's an 8.
I am still unhappy with the pricing model for the enterprise. Graylog competes against the likes of IBM and Splunk, but your still the new kid on the block. To price Graylog enterprise at 50k for 20GB ingest an unrealistic data. It would require multiple facets of Graylog to be stood up and only forward pruned logs to the paid version.
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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.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Azure Monitor is not exactly what I mean, but I couldn't find Azure Application Insights. Anyway, for a large organization, Azure makes more sense than using Graylog because a lot of logging will already be inside Azure. And you don't want to have two "central" logging locations. But Azure is chaos and highly "not intuitive." So for small and mid-size organizations, Graylog is still the better option.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Able to offer monitoring services to new and existing clients to increase revenue
  • Staff have increased billing percentage
  • Potential to expand security services
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  • 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.
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ScreenShots