Zabbix Vs Whats'UP Gold v15

[colloque]

Hello,
Hello,
We currently have Whats'UP v11. My boss will wish to make an updated version of the product in Whats'UP Gold v15 (For he loves Whats'UP). Now I will wish to propose an alternative that zabbix 1.8 or the future version 2.0.
In this regard I would like to know the strengths and weaknesses of the two products in order to provide relevant information.
Do you have a table comparing (matrix) the two products recently?
Do you have an experience with these two products into production?

Thanks for your response.

[eskytthe]

I do not know whatsup gold, but if you can provide some details regarding your environment (server and/or network hardware, operation systems) etc. and your monitoring focus (applications/middeware/os/hw?) we may be able to give some comments.
Br
Erik

[Zaniwoop]

Hi,

There is a table of functionality for number of products, including Zabbix and Whatup Gold at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...toring_systems. Although it rates Zabbix higher, I don't think it really explains the true power and functionality of Zabbix.

I was a Whatup Gold user for more than 10 years.

What motivated me to look at other options was $$$. They changed their pricing model; the annual maintenance was going to cost me 5 times the original purchase price.

Also they would only support MS SQL version xxx for the database. Because of the size of my database, I could not use the express edition, which meant that I not only had to pay a fortune for the application, I needed to pay per-processor licenses for the Database.

I spent 6 month researching all other available options. Both commercial and opensource.

I eventually settled on Zabbix, because not only did it provide me with all the functionality I needed, but it is far more powerful and configurable than WUG and has additional functionality (Jabber, IPMI, etc).

I now have the ability to monitor more than just Windows servers and SNMP devices. I can monitor my Linux servers, the weather and exchange rates.

The Zabbix agent's user definable parameters allows you to monitor items previously un-thought of; limited only by your imagination and abilities. (I use it at home to switch off the children's PCs at bedtime - and stay off)

If you can measure it you can monitor it.

The Zabbix Forums are far more helpful than the support you get on WUG's forums. I usually get a response within hours on these forums and some of the treads continue for months or years. Opensource users are far more willing to share their knowledge and experience than commercial users - you pay for something, it becomes property you don't want to share.

And then there is the price:

• Operating System - $0.00
• Appplication - $0.00
• Database - $0.00

My current installation, which is not large in comparison to other installations.

• Number of hosts: 661
• Number of items: 14 960
• Number of triggers: 4 001
• New values per second: 288.21

All running on one server, because it is coping very well. But it can be split onto a separate servers for the application, database and web-server.

It also has the ability to run in a distributed mode with regional pollers. I believe WUG now has that feature, but it is at a cost.

[colloque]

Thanks ZaniWoop for your information.

For eskytthe, the informations:

Serveurs Linux RedHAT, Debian
Serveurs Windows NT,2000,2003,2008
Serveurs HPUX 11iv2 (11.23)
Routeurs CISCO
Bornes Wifi
Printers
SAN Switch
Controller
**************************
- About 500 hosts monitor
**************************


Application middleware (Apache, Tomcat, Java)
Application (job application)
WEB (Response time, simulation trafic WEB (ex: 500 connexion together), Web Page content)

Hardware (IPMI/WMI) for each network node (Serveurs, Routeurs, Switch, Wifi terminal, Controller, printers, air conditionning, ..)


VMWARE (ESX 4/4i) (Hypervisor / Node)

BDD Oracle, MySQL

Bay NetAPP


Other:
-> supervision of the elements with a map and audible alert and e-mail (I know that zabbix do it but i found the map it's less good that What's UP map)
-> Discovery network elements (Zabbix 2.0 - When will zabbix 2.0 arrive ?)

Thanks too.

[nelsonab]

Don't forget Zabbix SIA also offers support plans which are very affordable and can provide an even faster turn around than the forums. In addition there is training which has a cost multiplier as well because when someone goes to training they can come back and do a knowledge transfer with the rest of the team. That knowledge transfer won't be as complete as the training but it helps spread the costs to the whole team.

[eskytthe]

Hi Colloque
I see now you have a lot of posts in this forum, so you already must be an experienced zabbix user. Maybe you can use the zabbix feature list as a reference or to compere to Whats UP to convince your boss: http://www.zabbix.com/features.php

Have just take a short look at Whats'UP home page. For me it looks like Solarwind - it is a ok “light” monitoring tool, mostly useful in windows environments (?), and ok for basis (snmp) network monitoring. (Well zabbix snmp could need some improvement). But I cannot see how you can monitor the rest of your environment without Zabbix

As Zaniwoop note, with zabbix you can monitor nearly everything. You can rather fast make some addons to include what you want. People use eg. Cacti, nagios, munin scripts to extend Zabbix if needed. In the forum there are solutions for most of your devices and applications - cisco, java, apache, tomcat, oracle, netapp wmware etc. (make a note if you need some links).

The perf_counter function in the zabbix windows agent is unique, and make even advance window monitoring easy without need of baying special agents for every windows application.

I have worked with several of the major monitoring tools (unicenter, tivoli, hp openview) and in none of them I have found the same flexibility as in zabbix, and implemented in a rather simple way.

Zabbix WEB monitoring is kind of basis, so you may need something else for more advance monitoring of that.

There is a lot of nice “addons” features from the community as you may already know eg:
Zabcon: http://trac.red-tux.net/wiki/zbx_api/zabcon
Lua Plugin: http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20578
Service Graph Tree: http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19505
….

I was at the conference in Riga, and it amazed me how different environments zabbix are used in and the things people use it for: http://www.zabbix.com/conf2011_agenda.php

Hope this help you.
BR
Erik

[eskytthe]

Some extra:

Audio alerts (just do a search in the forum):

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?p=90559

Zabbix 2.0 release schedule:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?p=92998

/Erik

[colloque]

thanks a lot eskytthe