Zabbix vs Nagios

[n0mad44]

Hi,

Does anyone have a comparison between Zabbix and Nagios ? Or just a start of a comparison !

I'm trying to force my company to use zabbix insteed of Nagios....

Help will be appreciated (-:

Thanks,
n0mad

[bbrendon]

I've never used Nagios, but I'll tell you that you better test Zabbix thoroughly before going live. Zabbix is great, but the # of bugs in it can be frustrating.

1/10/2014 update - Google just sent me back to this thread and I saw my name so I thought I'd update this. The above statement is no longer true. I have a hard time finding bugs in Zabbix these days. It's 10x more stable and bug-free than it was so so long ago.

[Tenzer]

I've never used Nagios, but I'll tell you that you better test Zabbix thoroughly before going live. Zabbix is great, but the # of bugs in it can be frustrating.

It is just a matter of using the newest version, as far as I see it. Unfortunately some people use outdated versions found in the installation repositories in their OS.

[bbrendon]

It is just a matter of using the newest version, as far as I see it. Unfortunately some people use outdated versions found in the installation repositories in their OS.

Yes and no. Running the latest stable version often helps, but I find myself working around bugs for months or back-porting fixes from svn.

[krims0n]

My organisation is using Nagios to monitor a large number of services. Nagios is very, very stable and, if you set it up right, pretty easy to maintain. The major disadvantage of Nagios is that it is a pain in the ass to have multiple teams responsible for their own plugins, hosts and services. This is one of the reasons I am following Zabbix development closely Also features like screens & maps, integrated graphs and autodiscovery is something I miss in Nagios.

Stability is a must though, Zabbix 1.4.x had way too many bugs. When 1.6 comes out I will give that a proper test. If it is stable enough I will replace Nagios with Zabbix.

[Frodo]

We used nagios for a long time.
The advantages of Nagios are its stability the quite number of available plugins and a verry great community.
But for me zabbix is the more modern system.
The Webgui is clear an nice and i like the flexibility how i can script the agents (most time for Windows-System).

For the future i wish more stability and very important for me:

Solid upgrade packages!

[georgew]

Nagios works well when it works for you.

However nagios is very difficult to set-up. The person using nagios for the first time is left with a bewildering task of learning a very complex system without a good example. Nagios has no good configuration tool that is part of it's own native code. Groundwork, a third party company, has released two excellent nagios configuration tools that make nagios useful for even the first time user. However they are for early versions of nagios, and are not integrated, so they become useless over time. Groundwork no longer develops their package, and it is not part of the nagios package development, so those advances are being lost to time.

Nagios is a great tool, sort of like c++ is a great tool... But not all of us can be c++ programmers, nor can we all spend 6 months of our life trying to figure nagios out. The nagios team doesn't care about new users, there is no good forum support, the official support channel is a mailing list with one thread... with no searchable archive that I have found. the one nagios forum is down more than it is up, and it is not in existance any more according to the nagios wiki... In short, nagios is hard to learn, and there is no useful support. I set up nagios using the groundwork monarch tool, a great combination... too bad monarch is no longer being developed. Once I had my config files, it was "easy" to maintain... but only easy as compared to creating a config from scratch. Nothing about nagios is ever really easy...
maintenance is only easy to the person that set it up.

For being free software, nagios is extremely expensive. By that I mean it takes a tallented person to set it up, and maintain it, and it takes a lot of that person's time. So if you must consider the cost of the person building your nagios system, then it is far too expensive as compared to something with a user interface for configuration. the Nagios developers are programmers, and they don't care that only programmers can use it.

If a car was built like nagios, it would come as a block of steel, and lumps of rubber and plastic, and it would be up to the driver to carve and hammer the steel into the shape of a car. Nagios is not a "get in and just drive" system.

Zabbix is better because a user can learn to use it in a small number of days, and end up with a more complete tool when he is done. Zabbix combines several tools that are left out of nagios. Sure, you can try and integrate nagios with things like cacti, or rrd... But those integrations often fall apart when you update nagios or the other tools... so a "complete" nagios system that actually compares to zabbix on a feature level is difficult to create and maintain.

If Zabbix was a car, it would be like a car on a dealer's lot. You need to know how to drive, you need to maintain it a bit... But for the most part it is a get in and drive type of system... Once you have it installed.

Nagios can do anything zabbix can do, but only because an engineer can put in time to make it happen. The only hard part about zabbix is the installation.

I say this after spending years with nagios, and about 4 hours with Zabbix. I have not mastered Zabbix yet, but I can already see that it is better. Zabbix has the best features of monarch, nagios and cacti combined, and then even more features added to that. You still have to learn how it works, there is no avoiding that, but it is an easier task than any system with half of the features. The cool thing to me is that it can be configured to self-configure. I have a network of over 1000 broadband users. Zabbix can be configured to add and remove users on it's own, and that config is 1000% easier than the best nagios under monarch was able to do.

Now Zabbix is great, but it still has some issues. For example, I set it to discover my broadband network, but it is using the "public" snmp community string instead of the correct string I gave it... But that is likely just a bug that will get fixed (or I did something wrong). Nagios has even bigger bugs.

Nothing is perfect, but Zabbix is closer than anything else. And I say that as someone that has been monitoring unix systems and networks since 1987. In the old days we did things that hard way... We wrote out own scripts, we had no web interface, and sending email and text messages required you to develop the code to do those functions. Interestingly, writing your own monitoring scripts is actually easier than setting up nagios. And if you can't write monitoring scripts yourself, you probably can't set up nagios.

The easiest system to set up, of all time, was big brother. Big Brother had a simple, easy to unserstand, config file. It had no configuration gui when I used it, in the late 1990's, but it took only a couple of hours to set-up a complex network. the config file was little more than a list of machines that looked a lot like a DNS zone file, so copying your DNS zone files into it was a good place to start. But big brother was limited in many ways, and has gotten worse now that it is commercial... In fact it is no longer very good any more. Nagios tried to better big brother, as Net Saint... but they missed the mark in several ways when they made the config too complex.

Zabbix is the modern system, written by people that have obviously used many or all of the systems I describe here. I see influences of each of the other systems inside of Zabbix. So Zabbix is an evolutionary advancement over the likes of Nagios. Zabbix is to Nagios as a 747 is to an early biplane.
Both are good, both fly, but one is more advanced than the other... one is faster, and does more.

George

[bbrendon]

Nice post George. That'll help a lot of people.

[georgew]

Aww shucks... I'm just a Zabbix n00b, so everything I know is based on knowing something else... but I am impressed with what I do know about zabbix... evolution is a good thing!

[skogan]

I have used Nagios for several years and Zabbix for about half a year.
My view on it: Zabbix is GREAT for data collection and one centralized solution but it is challanged in several places:

- Scheduling up/downtimes - pretty much impossible right now.
- Notifications. In my opinion, notifications should be a completely separate thing from actions.
- soft/hard trigger states - a very important Nagios feature that I would LOOOOOOVE to see in Zabbix.
- In my opinion, separation of triggers by severity is a big mistake: it adds unnecessary complexity and is completely unnatural. Multi-state triggers would have been a far better thing

BTW, Zabbix being GPL software and all, is anybody interested in creating a fork?

[sdwilders]

I haven't used Cacti but I have used Nagios. I can think of a few advantages with Zabbix off the top of my head.

Firstly configuring Nagios is not easy - even just adding a new host takes ages, requires a third party tool if you don't want to manual ammend config files, and requires the server service to be restarted. With Zabbix it takes seconds, through the web interface, and doesn't require the service to be restarted.

I monitor thousands of hosts and Zabbix allows you to build your own maps of different network segments - Nagios just sticks them all on one huge map which is not in any way useful.

Also, the Zabbix windows agent is sooooo easy to install - Nagios doesn't have a set agent and everyone I have used is not straight-forward to use. The worst part about Nagios agents is that you have to configure each individual one - so if I want to monitor a new item, I have to add it to every single agent, not easy when monitoring several thousand machines. With Zabbix, you add it to the server and the agents ask the server periodically what information it wants.

Thats just 3 that spring to mind but I'm sure there are many more. I have looked at many systems and tried both Nagios and Zabbix - Zabbix is far better in my opinion.

[swaterhouse]

BTW, Zabbix being GPL software and all, is anybody interested in creating a fork?

Why would you fork? If you have the skill and time why dont you start working on your needed functionality and submit it as a patch. I know that well written patches are almost always incorporated into the project. I am sure that the ZABBIX team would appreciate any help they can get.

I for one would love to see some of the improvement talked about here and elsewhere but have neither the time nor skill to get them done.

[skogan]

Why would you fork? If you have the skill and time why dont you start working on your needed functionality and submit it as a patch. I know that well written patches are almost always incorporated into the project. I am sure that the ZABBIX team would appreciate any help they can get.

Yeah.... not to badmouth (too much) the Zabbix development team, but their project management skills are not exactly to die for. Patches are not accepted with open arms (even bug fixes), and no new people are accepted into the development team. Unless, of course, you pay them money .

I for one would love to see some of the improvement talked about here and elsewhere but have neither the time nor skill to get them done.

Frankly, I'm contemplating starting my own project from scratch. I have a couple of ideas that could work very well (or fail miserably), but they would be totally incompatible with Zabbix. Either that or forking.

[Aly]

I know that well written patches are almost always incorporated into the project.

Good point.

[Emir Imamagic]

Hi,

as a Nagios user I would like to add following things I miss in Zabbix:
1. Availability reports for custom period. For us this is a must since we get contracts for custom periods and we need to present availability reports for specific services for that period.

2. Nagios plugins describe state of monitored service (or item in Zabbix) with three parameters: status (number), summary data and long data (only in version 3). This enables you to track state and get more detailed information what happened to your service (e.g. output of the underlying command used by plugin, response from monitored service). Zabbix items have only one. So you need to choose between (1) using status and loose details, or (2) use detailed output and loose availability graphs or (3) use two separate items for status and output (which makes triggers much more complicated). (If there is a another way that I'm still not aware of would be glad to hear it).

3. Ability to schedule a check for specific service/host through the web interface. This feature is very useful if you want to check that you really repaired something and don't want to wait for the next scheduled check.

After analysis of available systems we found Zabbix to be the best choice for gathering performance data. Features like flexible web interface (especially graphs in v1.5), easy addition of custom performance data, native, non-intrusive agents for various platforms, support for both push/pull communication, templates and custom host-level configuration options make it really good in that area.

However due to all these issues with availability monitoring and great deal of experience with Nagios we're planning to keep Nagios for monitoring availability of services and use Zabbix only for gathering performance data. Anyone has comments on such approach?

Cheers,
emir

I have used Nagios for several years and Zabbix for about half a year.
My view on it: Zabbix is GREAT for data collection and one centralized solution but it is challanged in several places:

- Scheduling up/downtimes - pretty much impossible right now.
- Notifications. In my opinion, notifications should be a completely separate thing from actions.
- soft/hard trigger states - a very important Nagios feature that I would LOOOOOOVE to see in Zabbix.
- In my opinion, separation of triggers by severity is a big mistake: it adds unnecessary complexity and is completely unnatural. Multi-state triggers would have been a far better thing

BTW, Zabbix being GPL software and all, is anybody interested in creating a fork?