Zabbix

Overall Opinion: Companies on the enterprise scale are complicated beasts with too many moving parts to count. While the notion of tracking the inner workings of a business on this scale may seem an insurmountable obstacle, it's not. The amount of data available to savvy business owners is immeasurable, but the real challenge comes from making sense off it. Zabbix can provide you with the tools you need to properly organize, analyze, and visualize the important data so that you can make informed decisions about the direction of your company. The scale of Zabbix is impressive. They boast that they can monitor tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines, and network device and draw out millions of metrics in the process. Zabbix is concerned with the back end functions of your network and allows your IT team to respond quickly to potential threats and resolve them in a manner that's both timely and effective. Given the amount of data that Zabbix processes, it needs to work efficiently to make sure that users have the information they need when they need it. It accomplishes this in large part through the use of data evaluation rules which offer logical rules for problem states. That allows Zabbix to treat potential issues as a binary problem and register situations from OK to problem more quickly. Users have a lot of leverage in the sorts of rules definitions they choose to create. In addition to basic mathematical functions, these rules can be set according to logical rules as well. These can be layered together to create complex conditions, and thus eliminating false positives in Zabbix's evaluation process. Your IT team has more important things to do than spend all day digging through menus. Zabbix's front end is elegantly designed and visually stimulating, placing all the information users will need in a glance on a single dashboard. The graphical user interface allows you to designate as many graphs as you want on the front screen so you can track metrics in real time, but it's not the only component of the front end interface. Your monitoring configurations can be handled directly through the graphical interface, so you won't have to wrestle with command line interface coding, and all the metrics and information about your network is gathered in a single menu so your administrator can efficiently sort through potential problems and address them directly and immediately. Your alert readiness can be further bolstered through the inclusion of global notifications that will pop up when conditions are met anywhere within your monitored network. The notification menu floats above the interface proper so your people will never miss out when something important is happening in the network. The best part of Zabbix is that it's completely free to use, and its open source structure leaves your team plenty of space to tinker.

Pros: Scales well to businesses of any size Free for anyone to use and completely open source

Cons: Open source structure reflected in its sometimes obtuse and chaotic design Small team means there's little in the way of documentation or tutorials