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Comment by golovast | Hacker News Reader

That's not true. Maybe that's the impression it gives off, but it's a very good package that blows Nagios out of the water. It's UI/UX needs work and some things are a bit quirky (to say the least), but it scales well, works quickly out of the box (basic level), has decent and improving API, integrated graphs, etc.

It's not perfect and suffers from the same problems as other monitoring systems, but given the options it's better then most systems with similar scope.

P.S. I am not affiliated with them in any way shape or form. Just used it for a little while.

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Compared with graphite/etc, it absolutely is true. A project is judged against its competition. The things you are talking about (UI, scaling, graphs, etc) are not my concerns with it. I don't doubt that it is "very good", for at least several values of "good", but that is missing the point.

Right off the bat, here are differences between barrier to entry (ignoring the "enterprise" stench and consulting/contracting emphasis for the moment):

  Installation:
    Graphite:
      Homepage -> links to  pip / github / launchpad
    Zabbix:    
      Homepage -> Downloads -> Download -> RHEL binaries?!?!  -> Oh nevermind, sourceforge link.....

  Sending metrics to the system:
    Graphite:
      Homepage -> documentation -> getting your data into graphite
    Zabbix:
      I'll be honest, I just gave up.

It just gets worse from there. I don't want to become my companies "Zabbix guy". I want something that I can just get working as rapidly as possible with as little heartache as possible. Particularly heartache that seems suspiciously intentional considering the number of ways you can find yourself on a "hire us to train you!" page on their site...

Zabbix reminds me of all the things I hate about working for a PHB who makes technical decisions at large corporations. Maybe that is an unfair take-away, but that take-away is entirely their own fault.

Honestly, it seems to me you gave up pretty easily there.

I spent about 5 minutes looking, I have better things to do on my downtime, but it seems you have forgotten what my original claim was (or what your original question was).

High barrier to entry. Maybe you think the barrier to entry for Zabbix is low enough, and maybe you think it is a better project once you get over that bar, but what is undeniable is that Graphite very clearly has a lower barrier to entry.

If you want to know why so many people use Graphite instead of Zabbix, that is the reason. If you want to tell all of those people that they are wrong for going that route, be my guest, but that isn't what the discussion is about.

I've answered your question, I feel, entirely accurately.

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