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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(167)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.
Attribute Ratings
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(1-20 of 20)Zabbix is best over all
- ICMP monitor
- Disk health monitoring
- Interfaces monitoring
- WhatsApp integrations
- Trigger customisation
- User interface
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
"The network guardian, excellent product."
- Easy to configure.
- Centralized monitoring.
- Web-based interface.
- Flexible.
- Distributed control system.
- Secure user authentication.
- Supports different operating systems.
- I think some work should be done on the interface to change its appearance and organization to create a more pleasant experience.
- It would be very useful to have more resources in documentation to perform certain processes on the tool, which would help to cover a better development.
Please see this Zabby review of Zabbix.
- Alarm monitoring.
- Performance graphs.
- Creation of new alerts - either fault based or performance based.
- Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
- More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
- The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.
It is configured to run discovers on our vCenter to grab any new VM and to start monitoring its CPU, Mem, Disk usage, etc. For specific applications, those more critical to the business, we create templates to monitor the services.
We have also created some tests using CURL to authenticate to applications and measure the end-user experience, so we can generate alerts when an important application is taking more time than it was supposed to authenticate.
It also has a great 'SLA' dashboard, where you can see the amount of time that an specific application was out-of-service during a period of time. We use it to provide some evidences to the business. Those applications can be constituted by multiple servers, services, databases, etc... It is very flexible on this level.
- Flexibility - as an open source application it is always evolving and adding new features
- It is free
- A wide range of natively supported technologies
- Several options for monitoring, from agent to SNMP and so on
- Doesn't have an official support
- Updates depends on the community
You don't have costs to implement and to use it, but in the other hand you don't have a professional support or SLAs to rely on. In case you base your monitoring of critical systems on Zabbix and it has an issue, you need to appeal to the community and it can take a long time to have an answer or have your issue fixed.
For these reasons I think it cant be the foundation of a monitoring process on large enterprises, but you can use it as a complement to have more flexibility.
A powerful, customizable and flexible monitoring tool
- Flexible, can be customized to fit pretty much any use case
- Multi-tenancy support, allows different teams and customers to be granted controlled access to host groups, dashboards and UI sections
- Automatic discovery of hosts and host items
- Highly customizable dashboards, maps, graphs and out of box templates
- Powerful alerting
- Availability of a well formatted official documentation that has the basic stuff
- Powerful API for integration with other systems
- Friendly user community, very important for FOSS
- Clear and open roadmap
- The official documentation isn't too friendly for first timers
- Requires considerable knowledge of Operating Systems, Database and PHP tuning.
One monitoring tool that has it all
- Zabbix does monitor any kind of IT solution for us like servers, networks, services, virtual machines, databases or websites.
- The new interface on Zabbix is really great.
- Out of box reports could be updated.
- If it's open source it doesn't mean it's free.
Zabbix a good solution if you have the time to dive in.
- History graphs show long-term trends, but still allow you to dig down to the minute.
- Custom dashboards allow for teams to only monitor what's relevant for them.
- The trigger-framework is pretty mighty and can act on a lot of metrics. This makes it also sometimes hard to comprehend.
- Setting up items, triggers, hosts, classes, etc. is first tedious, secondly not very obvious.
- Auto-discovery can get tricky if you don't have the correct configuration bits.
- Overall the UI is functional, but not necessarily pretty.
Zabbix is the best open source-based NOC platform you can find
- Zabbix is capable of monitors servers using its own agent. With that, it can collect detailed information about the asset and store it in its own database. Once that information is stored, Zabbix can alert potential issues and even be used to evaluate and run analysis for capacity planning.
- Zabbix servers are very simple to deploy. You can run on a Windows box, Linux box or even in Docker containers. It's very scalable and robust and doesn't need too many resources to run.
- Due to its open framework, you can easily integrate Zabbix to other front end platforms, like Grafana. We did that to leverage our previous knowledge to present graphics in Grafana with data sourced by Zabbix.
- Having worked with other similar tools, I tend to say that the user experience could be improved in some areas. The elements on the user interface are a little confusing, the concept behind them could be a little more intuitive.
- The discovery process could be improved, giving suggestions and filling some fields with common options, for example.
- When you add a host that runs it's own Zabbix agent, like a server, it's easy to manage. On the other hand, if you want to add a host which is a network device, for example, you need to run extra steps to ensure you'll see the information you want. That could be improved by using some kind of wizard or tutorial on the interface to guide you.
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 Power Users
Zabbix is heavily used by Systems, Network and Database Engineers as well as Applications Developers to provide visibility to what is happening in the environment, to notice a problem before our users do.
We have implemented Zabbix so that there is a central Zabbix server (hosted in AWS), with Zabbix proxies at each physical location where there is infrastructure. This way if the Zabbix server goes down, no data is lost, as it is cached on each of the proxies until connectivity is restored to the Zabbix server.
- Zabbix is able to provide us a single pane of glass for monitoring. It can handle Systems, Database, Network and application level alerts and send those alerts to the appropriate parties.
- Zabbix graphs all metrics that come in. This means it's easy to spot trends and create alerts based on when those trends cross user-defined thresholds.
- Zabbix allows for the escalation of issues. If someone sleeps through an alert in the middle of the night, it can easily be escalated to the next tier.
- In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts.
- Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable.
- This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller.
Zabbix is also highly appropriate in shops that are interested in building their own monitoring infrastructure, rather than using a service. These services are obviously not free, but the time that you invest in Zabbix may make up for that monthly spend.
Big fans of Large-Scale Zabbix for a decade
- Template system is really great, making it super easy to add new services and monitoring, graphs, etc. to any server.
- Security system is very useful for multiple teams, groups, and customers.
- Very flexible data gathering on a wide variety of protocols.
- UI is getting updated, but still dated a bit.
- Doesn't easily accept unsolicited data like Datadog, Prometheus, etc. can. Everything has to be pre-configured or discovered, making it hard to just send it metrics from code.
- Integration with AWS, Docker, Java, etc. is via 3rd parties or outside tools, so while the agent is great, it needs more reach.
Less-suited to highly dynamic environments, heavily in the cloud, with serverless, Docker, Lambda, etc.
Great monitoring platform
- Keeping an eye on our asset estate via SNMP is easy
- Single Pane view
- Wealth of plugins available to then customise for alerting
- User interface is a little cumbersome, but it looks like newer versions are looking to resolve the menu system issues i found
- If you really delve in, you should be ready for some coding and tweaking
- Allows for centralized monitoring of many separated environments.
- Out-of-the box templates for many operating systems.
- Auto discovery and confirmation allows new environments to be added quickly and easily.
- The web frontend isn't always intuitive, can be hard to find things that you know you saw somewhere!
- Zabbix expressions require somewhat of a steep learning curve.
- Documentation not always as complete as it could be for some options.
Zabbix is Overall a good tool
- Server monitoring
- URL availability
- We write custom application monitoring scripts and send the data to Zabbix.
- Ability to authenticate to a webpage and monitor, just like keynote.
- The web scenarios doesn't work well with REST end points. No feature to read the response header.
Zabbix - The Monitoring Swiss Army Knife
- Alerting, while it can be difficult to initially learn, Zabbix's alerting system allows you fantastic control over how and when each of your team members receives alerts. This has caused a large decrease in "Friendly Fire" spam, preventing our staff members from getting complacent when they see a alert come through.
- In a couple of clicks, you can turn any monitorable data into a graph, which can then be deployed to any number of systems. Its ease of use makes it a fantastic tool.
- Zabbix makes adding new devices for monitoring very easy due to its template system.
- Due to its complexity, there is a pretty major learning curve for new users. However, after you get the concepts on which it relies down, it's a very easy to use system.
- Many plugins require SSH access to install their dependent scripts. This is not a big deal in some situations, however it limits who can work on adding new device types.
- Zabbix's documentation is robust, almost all answers you could ever need can be found on their website. However it's not really arranged in a way that speeds people in to the basic uses of the platform. They could really use a simplified "Get Started" guide.
Zabbix - A must have tool in your infrastructure
- Monitoring performance indicators like CPU, memory, network, disk space and processes can be done easily with Zabbix agent, which is available for Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms.
- Zabbix can gather stats like disk failures, temperature and voltage from hardware through IPMI, thus ensuring uptime and reduces risk.
- Zabbix lets you integrate it with your custom checks. You can write your own check scripts in Bash, Python or Perl and integrate it with Zabbix.
- Zabbix has a steep learning curve and doesn't have a very intuitive and user-friendly interface.
- Zabbix is resource hungry. It uses a DB to store all the stats and configuration and this can grow exponentially depending on the number of hosts you are monitoring.
- Zabbix doesn't have a very thorough documentation, so you have to search for issues and ask the Zabbix community at times.
Zabbix just works
- Nice graphing for non-technical personnel
- Good monitoring system
- Versatile for custom scripts
- Nice options for notification if problems arise
- There was a bit of a learning curve for creating custom scripts, if my script returns a 1 or 0, Zabbix should accept it no matter what and be able to work with it for an alarm
Zabbix 2.4 in a fairly large environment
- Supports many different devices and server platforms
- Customization of alert thresholds and notification actions
- Automatic resolution of problems via remote commands
- High level management always wants a "dashboard", while Zabbix can provide several different views, there seem to be third party products to provide alternatives. Maybe a best of breed dashboard could be added to the base product.
- Zabbix performance largely depends on the performance of the underlying database, it takes planing and good infrastructure to support large environments.
- It is possible to break things accidentally when making configuration changes, using Update when you meant to Clone, maybe a few strategic "are you sure you want to change this" prompts would help.
- Zabbix is capable of true customization. I personally recommend starting with a narrow scope, and broadening Zabbix to monitor more granular activities. Doing a bulk discovery and mass deploying alerts will cause a lot of false positives which are not actionable initially, so it can be a struggle to sift through the noise and find the alerts you really want to act on.
- Zabbix is easy to deploy, and has a robust feature set.
- Zabbix is easy to link up to services like PagerDuty, which are beneficial for on-call engineers.
- Zabbix could benefit from integrating with Logstash in a more formalized way. Utilizing these two open-source services compares to the much more expensive Splunk.
- I think it's important to deploy Zabbix to core systems first, then build more granular monitoring as false alarms are minimized. If you mass deploy Zabbix to all servers with very granular alert thresholds, you will have a hard time sifting through all the noise to get to the actionable alerts you really wanted to see.