CA Spectrum vs. Zabbix

As of February 2019, CA Spectrum is ranked 5th in Network Monitoring Software with 33 reviews vs Zabbix which is ranked 2nd in Network Monitoring Software with 20 reviews. The top reviewer of CA Spectrum writes "Great network discovery means we have high confidence in our inventory". The top reviewer of Zabbix writes "My extended experience with Zabbix or how to cook toasts". CA Spectrum is most compared with Nagios XI, SolarWinds NPM and CA Unified Infrastructure Management. Zabbix is most compared with Nagios XI, Icinga and Centreon. See our CA Spectrum vs. Zabbix report.

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure.
The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format.
We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system.We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention.What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative.I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.The product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow.What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, In Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other.I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly.E-mail alert notifications are valuable.

The Spectrum tool improved our network assurance levels for our business units.All networks (or network equipment) are monitored through CA Spectrum.It is easy to understand and determine when and/or where the network is failing.The monitoring just comes to us: "Oh, there's something wrong with that machine." It tells us. There are some 50,000 machines or so, all doing different things. And if they go down we hear about it.It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition.As the kind of enterprise that straddles the line between telco size and enterprise size, it scales for us, because we're not all the way at telco yet.​It covers a lot of different types of hardware. It can do a lot and saves us time.​It is very stable. We have not had any major issues in over 10 years.

Working on OS level features helps us do real analyses to determine conditions.Zabbix can use old data to current data to set the threshold. We can use previous data to set the threshold.We use it to monitor and manage our servers.Every new asset placed in the environment can be automatically detected, predicting human failures.It can send messages to our ticketing system.It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.​We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes.Health and communication links availability.

I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive.The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution.Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views.The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout.Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on.There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking.This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud.It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version.

The CA Technologies sales team destroyed their relationship with our business units.It needs better integration with other CA products.OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc.Make it easier to certify devices.If they could interact with the MIBs of vendors better, and have a lot more pre-loaded ones, that would be amazing for us right now.The Spectrum OneClick is a Java-based client, and that's aging. Really, before any new feature integration, I'd love to see a comprehensive rebuild of the UI.The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated.A better integration with the UIM, as far as being able to do root cause analysis and that type of analytics.

Adding a mapping subsystem would be helpful.I want Zabbix to improve the UX/UI. Zabbix doesn't use a JavaScript chart for images, and I want them to improve this.Correlation of events would be a wonderful addition.​I would like to better be able to monitor Oracle processes.​Look and feel.The dashboard and the graph section could be a little bit more professional.We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes.It should be easy to modify the front end.

The solution is very effective, despite the low price.Open-source solutions like this can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that they can quickly implement, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements.I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions.
The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts.The pricing is acceptable.They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this.For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite.Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing.It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them.

The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in.
For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all.It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly.It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller.

It is free, which allows us to reduce costs.It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation.We’re using the free version, which covers all our current needs.There are no licenses.It's free software released under the GNU/GPL license.The product is an open source and free solution.It is a true open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs.It’s free of cost.

The Centreon solution, based on a free to download Open Source Platform, monitors all critical IT Infrastructure and Applications with real-time dashboards, analytics and insightful alerts that prevent business-impacting downtimes.
Since 2005, over 200,000 IT professionals from SMBs and Fortune 500 companies rely on Centreon to guarantee their organization operational performance.

CA Spectrum can enable your organization to discover, optimize and improve its infrastructure and the business services running on top of it. By delivering large-enterprise scalability, robust features and superior root cause analysis, this solution can help your organization effectively manage its dynamic, complex IT infrastructure including physical, virtual and cloud environments as well as network virtualization.

Zabbix is the ultimate enterprise-level software designed for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines and network devices. Zabbix is Open Source and comes at no cost.

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