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Fluentd VS Zabbix

Compare Fluentd VS Zabbix and see what are their differences

Fluentd logo Fluentd

Fluentd is a cross platform open source data collection solution originally developed at Treasure Data.

Zabbix logo Zabbix

Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources
  • Fluentd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • Zabbix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-10-02

Fluentd features and specs

  • Open Source
    Fluentd is an open-source data collector, meaning it is free to use and has a large community of contributors and users who can provide support and plugins.
  • Unified Logging Layer
    It provides a unified logging layer that can collect, filter, and distribute logs from various sources to various destinations, simplifying log management.
  • Extensibility
    Fluentd supports a wide range of plugins for inputs, outputs, filters, and parsers, making it highly extensible and customizable to fit specific needs.
  • High Performance
    It is designed to be high-performance and can handle large volumes of logs efficiently, which is crucial for enterprise environments.
  • Flexible Configuration
    Fluentd offers flexible and straightforward configuration, allowing users to define complex data pipelines with relative ease.
  • Support for Multiple Environments
    Fluentd supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, making it versatile for various deployment scenarios.

Possible disadvantages of Fluentd

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and extensibility of Fluentd can introduce complexity, requiring a steep learning curve for new users to master the tool.
  • Resource Intensive
    Fluentd can be resource-intensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data, which may require robust infrastructure.
  • Plugin Compatibility
    While there are many plugins available, not all of them are always up-to-date or compatible with the latest versions of Fluentd, potentially causing integration issues.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Managing Fluentd involves continuous monitoring, updating, and maintenance to ensure optimal performance and security, which could be resource-draining.
  • Documentation Gaps
    Although there is extensive documentation, some users report that it lacks deep insights and examples for advanced configurations, requiring additional research and community support.

Zabbix features and specs

  • Open-source
    Zabbix is free and open-source, allowing for extensive customization and modification to meet specific needs without licensing costs.
  • Scalability
    Zabbix can handle a large number of devices and data points, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Zabbix offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including servers, networks, cloud services, and applications.
  • Alerting and Notification
    It provides robust alerting mechanisms, allowing notifications via email, SMS, and other methods.
  • Flexible Configuration
    The system allows for detailed and flexible configuration, accommodating various specific monitoring requirements.
  • Extensive API
    Zabbix comes with a comprehensive API that allows for integration with third-party tools and custom automation scripts.
  • Strong Community Support
    As an open-source project, Zabbix has a strong community that can provide support and share best practices.

Possible disadvantages of Zabbix

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complicated and time-consuming, often requiring a steep learning curve.
  • Resource Intensive
    Zabbix can be resource-intensive, particularly on the database side, which might require substantial hardware resources for large deployments.
  • User Interface
    The user interface is considered less modern and user-friendly compared to some commercial alternatives.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate for new users.
  • Maintenance Effort
    Ongoing maintenance, such as updates and troubleshooting, can be labor-intensive.
  • Dependency on MySQL
    The heavy reliance on MySQL databases can be a disadvantage for users preferring other database technologies.
  • Initial Costs for Large Scale Deployments
    Although the software is free, the costs associated with setting up and maintaining the necessary infrastructure and hardware can be significant, especially for larger deployments.

Analysis of Zabbix

Overall verdict

  • Zabbix is generally considered a good choice for organizations looking for a comprehensive and scalable monitoring solution. Its open-source nature means it doesn’t involve direct licensing costs, though it may require investment in resources to set up and maintain.

Why this product is good

  • Zabbix is known for being a robust open-source monitoring solution that provides extensive features for monitoring networks, servers, applications, and cloud resources. It offers real-time monitoring, alerting, reporting, and visualization functionalities. The flexibility to configure custom metrics and alerts makes it suitable for diverse monitoring scenarios. Additionally, Zabbix's capability to integrate with other IT systems and support for a wide range of devices adds to its appeal.

Recommended for

    Zabbix is recommended for IT departments in medium to large enterprises that need detailed infrastructure monitoring and have the technical expertise to customize and maintain the system. It's also suitable for environments where open-source tools are preferred and where extensive customization of monitoring configurations is necessary.

Fluentd videos

How-to Ship Logs to Grafana Loki with Promtail, FluentD & Fluent-bit

More videos:

  • Review - OpenShift Commons Briefing #72: Cloud Native Logging with Fluentd
  • Review - Fluentd, the Open Source Data Collection tool

Zabbix videos

An overview of Zabbix 4.0 and how we are using it.

More videos:

  • Review - Zabbix Monitoring Solution - Overview
  • Review - ZABBIX Network Discovery For Dynamic Deployments

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Fluentd and Zabbix)
Monitoring Tools
11 11%
89% 89
Log Management
15 15%
85% 85
Security & Privacy
100 100%
0% 0
Performance Monitoring

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Fluentd and Zabbix

Fluentd Reviews

11 Best Splunk Alternatives
The CloudFront-log plugin, for example, can be used to ingest logs from Amazon CloudFront, while the elasticsearch plugin can be used to route logs to Elasticsearch. Fluentd only provides ingestion and routing services, so you'll have to develop your log management solution from the ground up. Fluentd has become a popular alternative to Logstash, transforming ELK into EFK....
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Inputs and outputs have inbuilt support to buffer, load balance, timeout and retry instances. It has a unified logging layer in between the data sources. There are over 5000+ companies that rely on Fluentd and approximately collect logs from over 50000+ servers. It scraps logs from sources and sends them across to services like object storage, Elasticsearch, etc. it is...
Best Log Management Tools: Useful Tools for Log Management, Monitoring, Analytics, and More
Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure. Fluentd’s flagship feature is an extensive library of plugins which provide extended support and functionality for anything related to log and data management within a concise developer environment.
Source: stackify.com

Zabbix Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    Indispensable

    Zabbix has been part of my toolbox for quite some time. I can easily say it's an indispensable tool for me now.

    Managing a dozen servers without Zabbix would be unimaginable. I'm monitoring all of this: CPU, Memory, Hard-drives, website response times, downtime. The UI might be a bit "old school", but everything works flawlessly.

    With regards to hard-drive monitoring, I love the machine learning option that allows you to "predict" the number of days before running out of space. That's quite helpful, as I've got some of my servers down due to running out of space multiple times in the past (before I was using Zabbix).

    👍 Pros:    Open-source|It can monitor everything
    👎 Cons:    The ui is a bit unintuitive in some cases

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Unlimited scaling: Zabbix is a flexible software that lets you monitor anything you want. It is highly scalable as it helps you manage both multi-tenant enterprise environments and your home.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Zabbix is a very strong competitor to Nagios and its development is very encouraging. Zabbix is completely free to use, which makes it a competitor to Nagios Core. Zabbix beats Nagios in the free monitoring market because it has a good frontend, which Nagios Core lacks and it also provides NetFlow monitoring, which isn’t present in Nagios Core – that is a separate paid...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
Zabbix, a widely adopted open-source monitoring tool, offers a range of practical features. It allows you to monitor various aspects of your system, including transactions, application performance, and real browser monitoring. With ready-to-use templates for different servers and operating systems, Zabbix simplifies the monitoring process.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Zabbix offers a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure through its user-friendly web-based interface. It delivers potent visualization capabilities through customizable dashboards, complemented by robust alerting mechanisms and comprehensive support for alert escalations.
Source: signoz.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Zabbix seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 5 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Fluentd mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Fluentd yet. Tracking of Fluentd recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Zabbix mentions (5)

  • Learning Resources
    Official Zabbix trainings, documentation on zabbix.com ? Source: over 2 years ago
  • zabbix installation
    Hallo, do you know a howto to install zabbix on an ubuntu 20.04 ? I tried the manuals from zabbix.com for MySQL Apache but it didn't work. Source: about 3 years ago
  • How I am getting experience as a linux admistrator (Follow Up)
    He suggested that I indeed should set up a home-lab. To be specific he said that I should create a minimal install of Centos 8 and install zabbix server on it (https://zabbix.com) and monitor a whole bunch of other VMs, services and stuff.. He said that I should set up a variety of VMs and also maybe host a website on one of them. And then if I was able to do that, I could help to share a load of zabbix related... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ubuntu Impish 21.10 / Zabbix 6.0 LTS
    This is a fresh 21.10 install, using the install repo as detailed on the zabbix.com download page. Source: over 3 years ago
  • One dev conference speaker's family member died, need your help to fill the speaking slot on Nov 27/28
    Well, if you can't find anyone, I am more than happy to fill the slot with something regarding Zabbix - just let me know ;). Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Fluentd and Zabbix, you can also consider the following products

logstash - logstash is a tool for managing events and logs.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Graylog - Graylog is an open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

rsyslog - Rsyslog is an enhanced syslogd supporting, among others, MySQL, PostgreSQL, failover log...

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!