Zabbix vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Read 106 Zabbix reviews

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95% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Zabbix and vRealize Network Insight are network monitoring solutions with unique strengths. Zabbix has the upper hand in cost-effectiveness due to its open-source model, while vRealize Network Insight is superior in advanced features and integration.

Features: Zabbix is highly valued for automated network and item discovery, scalability, and customizable dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with third-party solutions like Grafana for data visualization. vRealize Network Insight excels in detailed traffic analysis, anomaly detection, and visibility, valuable in complex networks.

Room for Improvement: Zabbix users desire more intuitive reporting functions, improved predictive analytics, and better documentation. vRealize Network Insight users seek enhanced third-party integration, a more favorable cost structure, and improved micro-segmentation capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zabbix offers diverse deployment options and benefits from extensive community support, though it can be complex to deploy. Professional support is available if needed. vRealize Network Insight is typically deployed on-premises with good professional support, integrated with VMware products but at a higher cost due to its feature set.

Pricing and ROI: Zabbix's open-source approach provides significant ROI with no licensing fees, making it budget-friendly. vRealize Network Insight requires higher investment due to premium features, often priced per device, offering detailed analytics that justify its cost for advanced insights.

To learn more, read our detailed Zabbix vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: May 2025).

Zabbix vs. vRealize Network Insight

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

35th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

40th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zabbix

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

1st

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

106

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (10th), Server Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.6%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zabbix is 13.0%, up from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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B Ahmed

Manager, Information Technology Zara & Inditex at Cenomi

Enables seamless global client monitoring with reliable remote connectivity

I use the solution to provide a perfect environment for remote connectivity with my clients. Many tools that I require for system maintenance are included. I can easily monitor all of my clients throughout the world I did not give much thought to it, however, improvements could be made to Zabbix.…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It especially helps with deploying NSX, that you're not having to manually chase down and figure out what you need to do to microsegment VMs. This gives a nice option where you can say, "Hey, this VM, show me what flows are there." I can export it out and then import it as an NSX rule and job done."

"It's very user-friendly in the sense that the querying is just regular language like you and I speak or write. You don't need to know any SQL-query type of language to be able to get what you want out of it."

"As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need."

"Also, the ability to troubleshoot all the way across the NSX part of it to the physical and actually watch the packets go through and then see where the bottleneck is or where the interruption is. We run queries on the network flows within the application to find where they are in it and it graphically tells us how the packets are actually going through the system."

"With this product, we can precisely identify communication patterns between virtual machines within our data center, whether it's east-east or east-west communication."

"What's valuable to us is the ability to get a view into the virtual space, which is something we haven't had before. Before, it was done by collecting from network endpoints and extrapolating into the virtual environment. Now it's coming directly from the virtual environment."

"The graphical interface of this environment is so good with all the views, the graphics, and everything in them. It's really easy for me. It doesn't need an engineer to work on it. It's easy enough that anyone can get into the environment and look for issues or look at how communication is going on across the VMs. It's pretty much straightforward."

"It's user-friendly. It's similar to the GUI that most VMware products are moving to, and the consistency across those makes it easy to switch from one product to another. Also, the search bar at the top is plain text and it helps you, it guides you along with your search query, so that helps. The first day you're in there you can start building actual queries."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

"The solution allows for good integration with other products."

"Zabbix is very easy to implement."

"The most valuable feature is the protocol to manage anything."

"Templates are good. We download them from the official Zabbix site or the community. If the information we need isn't available, we create custom templates based on client requirements."

"Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product."

"They've already added extra features, such as noise-canceling and facial recognition, which is great."

"Setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two or three months."

"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."

More Zabbix pros

Cons

"While it's not exactly a feature, what normally happens when we are trying to look at the VM flow portion is - although Network Insight does have options to integrate a few physical switches into it - we can't really get an end-to-end flow of the network. We might be using a few switches that are not supported by Network Insight. That is where they can improve, in the support for more physical switches and network devices."

"There are some random glitches in the Web UI, but they are usually pretty cosmetic in nature. I don't really seem to use any browser other than Chrome with it. I also get some weird errors from time to time on the hardware NetFlow Collectors, where it doesn't sync data."

"After Broadcom acquired VMware, I would rate their support at five or less in many cases. It's difficult to find necessary documentation, open tickets, and get support."

"The only real improvement they can make is to add more third-party vendors into the environment, mostly switch manufacturers, because it's really limited to Cisco equipment and there are a lot of companies out there other than Cisco."

"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."

"The virtual appliance has rebooted."

"There could be some deeper analytics into packet inspection and trace flows. It could use some kind of machine learning to look at Layer 7 traffic for potential malware or corrupt packets."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

"The dashboard and the graph section could be a little bit more professional."

"The event correlation could be better."

"The APM monitoring has room for improvement, although I hear that the new 5.2 version has some improvements in that area, and I'd like to give that a go. I would like to see a few more templates out there for different styles of monitoring. I use the Grafana interface for reporting. I would also like it to have an out-of-the-box ability to email reports. You can create reports, but to be able to email those reports would be really helpful. I've got users who are not interested in logging in and generating a report. They want it all pre-canned and sent to an email address. It would also be really handy if we could pin certain reports up onto platforms such as Teams or SharePoint. A GUI for the proxy server would be cool to have for debugging purposes and for the support teams to have a look at, but I don't know whether that's really feasible to do. I get enough from the log files themselves."

"Zabbix could improve when it comes to large-scale use cases. Additionally, the inventory could be better when connecting to other solutions, such as ServiceNow. There show to be better integration with other platforms and storage."

"I think the reporting part of Zabbix can be improved in terms of more user-friendly graphics to display the collected data. Many simple users who don't know how to use Zabbix properly might get confused by the reporting, although at the same time it is very versatile for my company."

"Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."

"The server monitoring could be better."

"To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial."

More Zabbix cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"It has brought more money into our company."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

"We use the open-source version of Zabbix."

"The solution is free. However, many open-sourced tools start out free but eventually start charging."

"I use the tool's free version."

"It's free software released under the GNU/GPL license."

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation."

"I was using the free, Community Edition."

"Zabbix is a free solution but the support contact costs money."

More Zabbix pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user174738

IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

May 31, 2015

Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor

I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

What do you like most about Zabbix?

The template system in Zabbix is very beneficial as it saves time in configuration.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zabbix?

We didn't use the commercial version. We used the free version.

What needs improvement with Zabbix?

I think it's the best solution for monitoring. I don't know any better.

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Product Reports

vRealize Network Insight

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Also Known As

Arkin

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Overview

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software that provides real-time monitoring and alerting for servers, networks, applications, and services.

It offers a wide range of features including data collection, visualization, and reporting.

With its user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, Zabbix helps organizations ensure the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure.

Sample Customers

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

1. IBM 2. Dell 3. Cisco 4. HP 5. Oracle 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon 8. Google 9. Facebook 10. Twitter 11. LinkedIn 12. Netflix 13. Adobe 14. VMware 15. Salesforce 16. SAP 17. Intel 18. AT&T 19. Verizon 20. T-Mobile 21. Vodafone 22. Ericsson 23. Nokia 24. Siemens 25. General Electric 26. Honeywell 27. Philips 28. Sony 29. Samsung 30. LG 31. Panasonic 32. Toshiba

Zabbix vs. vRealize Network Insight