Overview
What is Zabbix?
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
Zabbix is best over all
Zabbix honest review from a satisfied user
It immediately alerts when there is a link down, device down, high resource …
Review Of Zabbix - Worth The Effort Eventually
"The network guardian, excellent product."
Please see this Zabby review of Zabbix.
My Honest review for Zabbix
An amazing, very flexible and free monitoring platform
It is …
A powerful, customizable and flexible monitoring tool
One monitoring tool that has it all
Zabbix a good solution if you have the time to dive in.
Reliable monitoring for a perfect profile of your network assets and connections.
Zabbix is the best open source-based NOC platform you can find
Best FOSS software for monitoring
Zabbix Power Users
Big fans of Large-Scale Zabbix for a decade
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What is Zabbix?
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
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What is Zabbix?
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. The core program is free, with paid support from the vendor. It provides out-of-the-box templates from Zabbix and community developers. Zabbix includes network health measurements, including memory utilization, packet loss rate, and predictive trends in bandwidth usage and downtimes. These measurements can be adjusted using custom thresholds for network health and security issue alerts.
Zabbix also offers automation capabilities, including automatic network detection, configuration management, and report generation. It also enables remote and scripted remediation efforts when an issue is detected. The open-source format of the software is designed to support customization by users and the community.
Zabbix Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
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(172)Community Insights
- Recommendations
Users of Zabbix have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the open-source monitoring tool.
Many reviewers suggest setting up a separate virtual server for Zabbix to facilitate an easy installation and configuration process. This approach allows for better manageability and flexibility in integrating Zabbix into existing infrastructure.
Zabbix is highly recommended for its ability to provide customizable alerts and monitoring capabilities. Users appreciate the flexibility to tailor notifications according to their specific requirements, allowing them to stay informed about critical events and issues.
Several users recommend Zabbix specifically for network performance monitoring. They find it suitable for large-scale environments, making it an ideal choice for big companies that need to monitor metrics across tens of thousands of devices.
While many users find Zabbix to be a valuable monitoring tool, some have also noted a few considerations. It has been mentioned by some reviewers that Zabbix may not be very intuitive and can be challenging to set up initially. To overcome this hurdle, users advise seeking support from the Zabbix IRC channel or having a Linux administrator assist with the server setup.
A few users have observed that Zabbix can be resource hungry compared to other monitoring solutions like Nagios. They mention that tuning and optimizing Zabbix may require additional effort to achieve optimal performance.
Overall, reviewers recommend conducting due diligence and planning ahead before implementing Zabbix. While it may require some initial investment in terms of time and resources, users find that Zabbix offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities and steadily improves its user interface over time. For smaller businesses or those utilizing virtual machines, reviewers suggest giving Zabbix a try as it can be deployed effectively in such environments.
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Reviews
(1-3 of 3)Review Of Zabbix - Worth The Effort Eventually
- Graphs of live network activity from switches and firewalls
- Shows SNMP data from hardware server out of band SOCs
- Complex alerting from hardware and lots of different kinds of OSs
- User interface
- Very steep learning curve
- Documentation is extensive but it doesn't provide good examples of how to complete basic tasks
- Alerting
- Showing usage trends
- Good ROI when trying to get ahead of network related problems instead of waiting for users to complain
- Good ROI when doing upgrades or exploratory work on a neglected network
- Good ROI when showing usage trends to management showing higher actual usage versus what was thought to be happening
- Alerting
- Monitoring
- Displaying trends for usage
- Has a nice feature where dashboards can be customized
- I would like to see Zabbix being able to monitor clouds natively like O365 or AWS
- Integration with Other Systems
- Implemented in-house
- I should not have used the demo appliance install
- Logging in
- Logging out
- Everything else
- Monitor connection availability.
- Monitor network assets.
- Generate reports on the performance of network assets.
- Generate reports on the performance of customer connections.
- Increase the number of configurable triggers.
- Clean the interface a little more.
- Leave the operation a little lighter.
- It improved our view of how customers' network connections worked.
- We can make proactive monitoring more efficient.
- Better customer feedback, with data collected from monitoring through Zabbix.
- Monitor servers
- Monitor Routers
- Generation of charts showing performance of network links.
- Até agora não foram percebidas.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
Best FOSS software for monitoring
- Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
- Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
- Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
- Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
- Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.
- Zabbix is very complex and the documentation, while complete, is not particularly well organized. In particular, I would like to see step by step instructions (similar to the synthetic user monitoring example) for installation and setup; more about what some of the numbers mean; etc.
- Zabbix system requirements are artificially high to cover every possibility, yet rarely are those resources used. Would like to see segmented resource requirements based on the size of monitoring to more efficiently size an environment.
- Zabbix has some nasty "gotya's" that are not really addressed in the documentation. For example, when first setting up an environment, there is nothing discussing the order of setup (host group, then users, then host, for example); but doing it in the wrong order will make it much more difficult to use later on. A tutorial (or series of tutorials) setting up the first several devices would go a long way here.
- Not so much a con as an UGLY that is common to most of this class of software - Zabbix requires a great deal of detailed understanding across several different IT disciplines. DBA knowledge for maintaining the database, System Administration for setting up and maintaining the server(s) and its software, Networking for setting up monitoring of the network, each software package you will have synthetic monitors of, etc. In most larger organizations, that means a lot of collaboration, but in smaller organizations, where it may only be a single person or team doing all the work, it means someone must be deeply knowledgeable about each aspect being monitored. It is no longer enough to just know the OS it is running on and leaving it to the user to know the software, or the network team to deal with the network issues.
Overall, I would put Zabbix on par with SolarWinds and the main differentiator is where are the costs going to be paid - in end-user training and support of Zabbix or in the commercial, ease of use provided by SolarWinds (and competitors).
- Zabbix allowed us to see where issues were with a new implementation of software that was having issues at one site but not the other. With the synthetic monitoring piece in play, we were able to isolate and quantify the issue and see who and what was actually having an issue (as compared to the typical user response of "slow").
- It has taken over 9 man-months to fully implement across a 1600 server global environment. Some of that issue was due to the poor design of the environment (mostly due to M&A processes that were never fully integrated), but part of it was due to no easy way to distribute the agents. Now, with the very recent release of 4.2, there is an MSI to allow for GPO deployments to windows machines, which would help tremendously for Windows-based environments. (Linux and Mac environments will still require extensive scripting or manual installations).
- Zabbix alerting allowed us to start alerting L2 application and server teams to be aware of disk space issues and resolve them before an outage occurs.
- SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, SolarWinds Log & Event Manager, SolarWinds N-central, SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer, SolarWinds Network Device Monitor, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Remote Monitoring & Management, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, SolarWinds VoIP and Network Quality Manager, Solarwinds Storage Resource Monitor, Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor, Nagios, Zenoss Cloud, New Relic, Datadog, WhatsUp Gold, Dynatrace, Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring and PRTG Network Monitor
New Relic is more for Application Monitoring, but the New Relic Infrastructure is a direct competitor. Datadog and Zenoss Cloud are similar. In all cases, infrastructure monitoring is both stronger and cheaper using Zabbix. It is also available on-prem, whereas these other options are not. However, the application side is better for New Relic and Datadog. Have not used Zenoss Cloud to determine it's strength in Application monitoring.
For SolarWinds (all components), WhatsUpGold, and PRTG Network Monitor, Zabbix is an equal competitor. It is cheaper up front, with no recurring subscription or renewal costs (though there are support costs if you choose to purchase it). It can be more difficult, especially compared to WhatsUpGold, which is the easiest to use of all of them (and least flexible). Overall, it is a question of where your money is spent moreso than how much with any of these options.
Nagios is FOSS software as well, but much more difficult to get to a usable state. Once in place, it is probably equal to Zabbix for maintaining.
Finally, Dynatrace is by far the best solution, but it is at a significant price over and above the other options available. It was just too expensive for us to consider our needs.
That said, once implemented, it only takes 1 person who is knowledgeable in Linux to maintain the application, and a DBA to maintain the database(s) (if it isn't the same person). This is independent of scale, in no small part due to the template system it uses.
- Network monitoring.
- Server monitoring.
- Application monitoring.
- Synthetic user monitoring.
- Don't know if it is unexpected or innovative, but we use it primarily to cut down on known recurring issues before they cause outages.
- TBD - have not had it long enough to identify new ways to use yet.
- We want to use it to map our IT network.
- We want to use it to correlate issues to speed problem identification and time to resolution.
- Price
- Implemented in-house
- Scaling the environment. If you don't know what you are monitoring, then it is likely you will not set up the templates correctly to scale the system efficiently. For us, that meant I have had to go back and restart many agents just to get them to pick up new or changed templates.
- Defining how you will monitor - How will you break down your host groups? By department? By application? By location? All of the above? Each of these works better if set up in advance, but for each implemented, you have exponential growth on the number and combination of templates to set up (at least if you are going to setup auto-registration, which is HIGHLY recommended for scaled deployments).
- Avoid automatic discovery or use with caution. Unless it is a very small or well-segregated environment, automatic discovery tends to discover more...fluff, than useful information. Further, after discovery, there is a lot of cleanups that typically must be done (naming each device, adding appropriate templates, etc.).
Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.