APC EcoStruxure IT Expert Vs Zabbix

[kevin.phea]

Hello everyone,

We got a customer that running APC Smart UPS & Smart PDU in their environment, and they will be setting up NOC team. Customer will be setting up their own Zabbix + Grafana custom monitoring tools and they throw in these few questions:

1. Can APC EcoStruxure IT Expert be host together with their Zabbix + Grafana monitoring tools under the same machine / VM?

Thanks!

2. What are the advantages of APC EcoStruxure IT Expert over Zabbix + Grafana monitoring tools?

[spezialist]

Dear @kevin.phea,

The answer to this post could be an entire review comparison article on the above products and cloud services. I have been professionally implementing and supporting both Zabbix and =SE= DCE software and cloud services under the common name of =SE= Eco Struxure IT for more than ten years. So I can answer your questions very briefly.

On the first question: yes, it is possible, but only as a test bench or for SOHO segment, where the number of monitoring objects does not exceed 5-10. Because I want to remind you that Zabbix + Grafana is in your case a whole set of heavy services with their own network ports, namely: zabbix service, posgresql or mysql service, apache or nginx service, php service, grafana service and maybe something additional (snmptapd service for example). And to connect to the =SE= Eco Struxure IT cloud service you will need to deploy the =SE= Eco Struxure IT Gateway software, which also has a number of heavy services with their own network ports, which may coincide with Zabbix ports, namely: Java applications server Tomcat, posgresql service, snmptap service. Now do you understand the complexity and ambiguity of combining everything with everything? The only case when you don't need to deploy =SE= Eco Struxure IT Gateway software is if you monitor exclusively new generation =SE= UPSs that have a special "Smartconnect ethernet port" (see smartconnect.apc.com).

On the second question: in brief, the advantage of Zabbix is that it is free and has a huge flexibility in the choice of monitoring protocols. Zabbix is a very flexible and powerful constructor that can be used to monitor absolutely everything, any services, any equipment, etc. But this is where its disadvantages come from -- it is a tool for professionals, deployment and configuration can take a lot of time and there is no guarantee that you will be able to quickly monitor your engineering equipment, which you have in use. Since there are often no quality monitoring templates for your engineering equipment, this becomes a significant problem.

With the cloud service =SE= Eco Struxure IT everything is exactly the opposite, i.e. its advantage is the speed and ease of deployment, accessibility even from smartphones and, most importantly, a huge database of ready-made, often very high-quality templates for monitoring engineering equipment from any vendor. The other day, for example, in ten minutes I was able to connect a generally noname UPS to this service for normal monitoring via the SNMP protocol, even though its vendor is not listed with =SE= in the lists of supported equipment :-). Well, the disadvantages of the cloud service =SE= Eco Struxure IT, as always, were and are a high price, the service is only paid and a very small set of monitoring protocols (at the moment only SNMP, Modbus and HTTPS for NetBotz devices).

Summarizing the above excerpts, we can say that the customers of free Zabbix are companies that have very competent IT professionals on their staff. And the customers of the =SE= Eco Struxure IT cloud service are companies that are always ready to pay for a ready-made and fast service that does not require IT preparation or investment.

[ESXITmarketeer]

@spezialist  raises some great points. This post here from @JLehr elaborates on the one of those points and outlines the vendor neutral experience that EcoStruxure IT offers https://community.se.com/t5/EcoStruxure-IT-forum/Offer-evolution-EcoStruxure-IT-vendor-neutral-DCIM-....

Thank you for input on this thread!