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Zabbix

Zabbix

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Easy to deploy: Many users have found Zabbix to be extremely easy and straightforward to deploy. Its user-friendly installation process …
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Zabbix is best over all

10 out of 10
September 29, 2023
We are using Zabbix to monitor server , ICMP, Hardware and interfaces. The Zabbix version 6.4 gives the accurate information and …
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Zabbix Power Users

9 out of 10
July 25, 2018
Incentivized
We use Zabbix to monitor both the internal IT Infrastructure, as well as the external IT Infrastructure. It was first implemented in 2010 …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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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  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is Splunk IT Essentials?

Splunk IT Essentials Work is an IT infrastructure monitoring standalone option from Splunk, providing server health insights, as well as cloud monitoring for hybrid infrastructures.

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Product Details

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 SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 5.

The most common users of Zabbix are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(164)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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

Reviews

(1-25 of 25)
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September 29, 2023

Zabbix is best over all

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using Zabbix to monitor server , ICMP, Hardware and interfaces. The Zabbix version 6.4 gives the accurate information and alerts.and we are using smartmontool to monitor disk bad sectors. The configuration part is smartmontool and smart Zabbix agent 2 for windows and Linux is good and easy to send notification on telegram.
  • ICMP monitor
  • Disk health monitoring
  • Interfaces monitoring
  • WhatsApp integrations
  • Trigger customisation
  • User interface
We are using Zabbix on our organisation to monitor our infrastructure to make sure uptime according to our SLA. there are multiple Zabbix dashboard to monitor our infrastructure. These are helping us to monitor well . If any outage detected our concern team take action and mitigate the same . I strongly recommend Zabbix.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use it to monitor the network devices of various customers.
It immediately alerts when there is a link down, device down, high resource utilization etc.
It helps me keep the network up and running 24x7
  • Alerts when a device or link is down
  • Can monitor the usage and utilization of bandwidth and resources
  • Checks and alerts for IOS updates
  • It can more features like Netflow
  • Should have the ability to access and do minimal changes on the network devices from within this Zabbix
Since this is an open source tool, it immensely helps startups who have no budget for monitoring tools.
It's easy install and manage.
Monitor your network 24x7 for free
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Zabbix to monitor pretty much everything plugged into our corporate network. This includes the basics like firewalls and switches and server hosts to the weird stuff like phone system PBXs and time clocks. Zabbix does have a steep learning curve and I had to watch a bunch of YT videos to understand how it wants to be setup. Since its open source, it likes to assume that everybody using Zabbix is going to have the same kind of skills as the developers, which is what holds back Zabbix from a bigger user base. It is very powerful software and can display enormous amounts of USEFUL information but its all hidden behind a user interface that is not as user friendly as it could be. I spent a good 40 hours doing the setup and configuration of Zabbix when I started at my current employer. The dashboards showing live firewall and switch activity blew away my boss and he said this was a game changer. The next question was could he tinker with it and add in more stuff to be watched. I said yes sure but have you got 10 hours for me to show the basics? My review of Zabbix is that it is fantastic software, if you have the time to dedicate to the setup.
  • 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
Very well suited for large complex networks where using something like PRTG may be too expensive. Not all worth the effort for small networks or small organizations with a lot of cloud activity.
Armando Gomez Alarcon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Zabbix in our company for the control and monitoring of each of the Gigabit Ethernet interfaces of the transport network, based on the premise that our network is a ring topology, we have distributed probes at strategic points that allow us to collect real and timely data on the status and behavior of each interface, On the other hand and not less important it facilitates the verification and monitoring of the BGP sessions with our international provider, a fundamental aspect since it depends on them that we can offer the service to our customers, we use it only in our department and with zabbix we can perform routine tasks such as backup, alarms and automatic monitoring quickly and effectively.

  • 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.
Zabbix is ideal for companies of any size, thanks to its flexibility and scalability, it is also very adaptable to different environments, it is very suitable for monitoring the availability and performance of industrial equipment, services and network hardware simultaneously and in real time, to control the resources available on the network, to centralize heterogeneous networks among others, it also facilitates its modification and design to be fully open source.

Asad Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We monitor Virtual network functions (VNFs) alarms & performance graphs on Zabbix. It is basically an FM & PM system that collects data from all the nodes & aggregates them in the form of user-readable graphs & XL sheets. It is also used to set performance-based alerts in the system & it can also be used as an aggregator for a big NMS type system like Nokia's NetAct.
  • 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.
Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.
Umair Mehboob | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Zabbix is the complete monitoring tool that can monitor any type of environment, We are monitoring Amazon-hosted EC2 instances and also Azure Virtual machines. Zabbix is very active in communicating with its agents. This tool is open-source and can be deployed on any Windows/Linux-based machine. We are monitoring more than 200 servers including the websites and windows services.
  • Server health checks.
  • Websites monitoring.
  • Windows services.
  • Zabbix must include the Amazon RDS.
  • UI/UX needs to be more catchy and detailed.
  • Zabbix must provide more templates for rich monitoring.
Zabbix is very well suited in monitoring health checks of servers and websites but Zabbix needs to add more health checks for other Amazon services including RDS. Zabbix provides complete support for creating custom templates but Zabbix must need to add pre-built templates. This tool is open-source so anyone can use this tool.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using Zabbix for almost 4 years now to monitor some specific servers and applications in our South America (+Portugal) sites.
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
From my stand point, [Zabbix is] very well suited for small and medium enterprises. The main benefit it is also it's worst quality: It is free / open source.
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.
Faustine Chisasa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Zabbix to monitor our infrastructure, network, services and applications.
  • 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.
Since it is highly customizable and flexible, Zabbix can fit most use cases.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an open-source monitoring solution, Zabbix is our preferred choice. Our company has been using it since 2017 to monitor all infrastructure. The overview we get from it is fabulous. It's immediate and it provides very clear information on many levels depending on what you want to see based on user roles and permissions. You can configure absolutely everything you can image with it.
  • 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.
It's perfect for large scale infrastructure as it has a lot of features included.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is currently one of our main monitoring applications (next to Munin). It is used to monitor the state of hardware (temperatures, hardware-errors), the state of the operating system (running, load, memory usage, etc.) and the state of services (running, network-connections, load, etc.). Additionally, some services can report on further metrics, e.g. if files are outdated or show unreasonable behavior. Through the trigger-framework, we can start automated mitigation, as well as manually inspect the issue.
  • 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.
For large organizations with a team around monitoring, it is a very practical tool to manage your infrastructure. It allows autoconfiguration/autodiscovery of hosts and metrics. When you think of monitoring a single host, or just a few, there are other tools out there that may be easier to set-up; thinking for example of net-data.
Ricardo Melo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Zabbix to monitor network assets and customer links to generate reports and resolve potential problems in its infrastructure.
  • 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.
Zabbix is ​​best suited for environments with computers running Windows (for the web interface) and where constant monitoring of assets and network connections is required.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In the beginning, we started using Zabbix in a small deployment, running the Linux box, deployed as a docker container. As we got familiar with the infrastructure, we decided to start using to basically monitor some servers. As we got confident, we started to monitor all the servers on-premise and some servers on a private cloud and finally, we included the network assets. Currently, it's been used just by our IT department and our main goal is to have a tool capable to monitor and early detect infrastructure issues to act as quick as possible.
  • 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.
If you are familiar with the NOC concept and have some background with the main concepts of monitoring and alarms, Zabbix is a powerful tool that could help you build your own NOC from the ground up. On the other hand, if you don't have experience with the matter, I suggest you read about NOC concepts before you deep dive into deploying Zabbix, because it will help you a lot when you understand the whys and hows.
Thomas Higgins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is primarily being used to monitor servers and services running on them, though it is starting to be used also to monitor network components as well. Secondarily, it is being used as a Synthetic User Monitor for web applications.
  • 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.
Zabbix is probably the best classical monitoring software out there that is also FOSS. It is superior to Nagios and other similar software from implementation to utilization, and equal in capabilities. It is equally capable to SolarWinds (and competitors), and more expandable (thanks to the support of user-generated XML templates), but at the cost of time, knowledge, and effort. It serves a different market than pure cloud monitoring solutions, though they do overlap heavily, so it probably is not as well suited to cloud-only monitoring (though it can be set up to work effectively in this role as well). However, given the flexibility of on-prem monitoring as well, it can be an option in conjunction with, or in place of the cloud-only monitoring if that is a need.

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).
July 25, 2018

Zabbix Power Users

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zabbix to monitor both the internal IT Infrastructure, as well as the external IT Infrastructure. It was first implemented in 2010 and it has evolved significantly over the years, giving us a single pane of glass for monitoring systems, storage, network and the applications themselves. By implementing a solution that provides us this level of visibility, Engineers only have a single place to look to find the root cause of an issue, rather than jumping from system to system, trying to correlate events.
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 well suited in an environment where connectivity is possible between all hosts in the network. Zabbix agents need to be able to "phone home" to the Zabbix server or a proxy. If connectivity is not possible between the agent and the server (typically the server is going to live in the "trust" section of the network, rather than a DMZ), Zabbix may not be a good fit. Zabbix is also appropriate in a cross-platform environment.
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.
Steve Mushero | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are big fans of Zabbix and use it as our core monitoring system for our Chinese MSP business, monitoring thousands of hosts for hundreds of customers across dozens of locations, data centers, and cloud. We've customized it with some UI enhancements, API additions, and DB integrations into ticket and service systems, too.
  • 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.
Very well suited to traditional IT and Internet monitoring, with servers, VMs, databases, etc.

Less-suited to highly dynamic environments, heavily in the cloud, with serverless, Docker, Lambda, etc.
Eric O'Callaghan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
While working at the Comcast headquarters as a Linux Engineer on their Splunk team, I set up Zabbix to monitor approximately one-thousand (1,000) physical servers running Splunk. It allowed us deeper insight into the use and performance of Splunk throughout our infrastructure. It also gave us the ability to prevent small problems (such as hard drive failures) from growing unchecked and leading to serious outages.
  • Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
  • Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
  • Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software
  • The first time that you use Zabbix, it may not be immediately obvious where everything is or how to find exactly what you want, but I think that it's UI is constantly improving with each new release. Training is also a great resource to resolve these types of problems.
  • While Zabbix allows in-depth customization of alerts to various applications (such as Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, or even SMS, etc.), I would love to see these options as built-in upon installation.
  • I have personally never found the "Maps" feature of Zabbix incredibly useful as I find it complicated to configure, but I should probably investigate its documentation further.
Zabbix is a great solution when monitoring a majority of Linux servers, in my experience. I have never personally used it with Microsoft Windows servers and I'm not sure that I would recommend doing so based on my lack of familiarity with doing so.

In any case, I find Zabbix incredibly useful if you want a clean UI that lets you monitor absolutely anything that you could possibly imagine. The ability to set up "Templates" and "UserParameter"s within Zabbix are easily my favorite features.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is a simple to setup and easy to manage solution. Very little in-depth tech skills needed to deploy initially due to pre-made ISOs and virtual machines, and with the help of a raft of templates available for free online to make it an essential monitoring tool for any business. Support is available if you want it - although from my perspective it looked to be costly if you simply want light email only assistance on your setup.
  • 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
This is our core monitoring platform, used to monitor all servers and perimeters for any issues in the network. We utilize it to alert the team on any low disks, failed devices or loss of ping to certain aspects of the network. It also monitors flow and other metrics via SNMP with a single pane view for easy management.
Josh Quint | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zabbix organization-wide to monitor several environments in AWS. Use of the Zabbix proxy allows us to manage many environments from a centralized location. We can graph and alert on all separate environments in a monolithic fashion. Zabbix's new trending and forecasting allow us to model performance based on trends in each environment.
  • 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.
Larger environments that are spread across different networks and physicalities play well with Zabbix with the use of Zabbix Proxy. It isn't very useful in things like AWS AutoScaled environments as IP addresses of the nodes constantly change and there's no good way to maintain the ephemeral nature of that type of environment in Zabbix.
Nishanthi Mohan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used across the whole organization. It's used to monitor the server parameters, application URLs, logs etc.
  • 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 is a good monitoring tool for servers and availability, but it needs to be used with other tools to achieve the required monitoring. There are some lacking features like browser synthetic monitoring, application performance monitoring etc..but overall it's good.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is being used for data collection and monitoring sections of our network. We use its information to plot out future resource bottlenecks, plan hardware upgrades, identify unusual usage patterns, failure rates, uptimes and execution of maintenance scripts.
  • 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 is an open source platform and because of that, support is lacking and flexibility is high. Zabbix is well suited for an environment with budget constraints, or the need for a monitoring platform with unlimited customization. I also found the template system to be extremely easy to work with, allowing for the near instant deploying of device types that were already configured. Making Zabbix a good fit in environments where devices come and go with regularity.
Deepshikha Gandhi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our operations team uses Zabbix to monitor our company's physical and virtual infrastructure. Zabbix monitors our servers, network gear, CPU performance data and application uptime. We have integrated Zabbix alerts with PagerDuty to get pinged when an issue arises.
  • 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 is great for monitoring protocols like HTTP, FTP, SSH, SMTP, SNMP, etc. It also has great features like visual analysis, customizable dashboards and system "templates". Features like auto-discovery and auto-registration let us manage infrastructure on the fly. The auto-registration function is very handy for automatic monitoring of a new AWS host. When a new cloud host is spun up, Zabbix will automatically start collecting performance and availability data of that node. On the other hand, Zabbix tuning can take a bit of time. You have to learn by experience. It could also improve its agent's footprint on machines. Zabbix is less appropriate if you have a huge, constantly changing infrastructure such as autoscaling. Application level monitoring is better done by other tools out there like Datadog.
December 11, 2015

Zabbix just works

Nadir Wade | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The company was using a very old version of Nagios at the time. I created a pro/con list for my manager on which monitoring application to switch to. Zabbix ended up being the winner based on features. It is specifically used to monitor EMR servers to ensure they are readily available for Office use at all times. We also used the software to notify support staff if there is an issue. The on-call person will receive the alarm and solve it as needed.
  • 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
I think it will work well in just about any environment where monitoring is necessary
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is used to monitor about 5000 network devices, 1000 servers and other services totaling 8000 hosts. Our IT department is deploying Zabbix to replace older monitoring services, to expand and modernize monitoring and alerting. Alerting is being automated and alerts are to be distributed to the responsible parties and even automate recovery where possible. Zabbix also stores a lot of useful "normal state" performance metrics for reference during problems.
  • 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 probably less powerful when dealing with Windows server, but that could just be our platform knowledge.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is a preferred option for our organization based on its open-source nature and versatile functionality. The Zabbix sender and trap features allow us to set up adhoc alerts based on specific criteria, such as log grepping for error frequency. We also use Logstash in tandem with Zabbix to generate alerts based on Logstash queries.
  • 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.
Zabbix is best suited for companies keeping the open-source mindset. If you're on a budget and want a robust and customizable monitoring system, Zabbix is a winner. Using Zabbix in tandem with Logstash (also open-source) and PagerDuty (nominal monthly fee) can open the potential and real-time alerting capability which will help responsiveness of network operations center (NOC) team members.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zabbix is currently in place monitoring servers and network hardware across the entire organization. We're using it to monitor service availability as well and have made attempts to use it for hardware monitoring as well, but the SNMP Trap support is lacking at best and very clunky to implement.
  • Service Availability Monitoring.
  • Disk Space Monitoring.
  • Host Availability Monitoring.
  • SNMP Traps.
  • Better documentation, detailed documentation seems to get lost/shuffled between versions.
  • Initial Usability (There's a pretty steep learning curve).
I've had great experiences in small to medium business where I've managed Zabbix to monitor all of our hosts/services, however in a larger environment it seemed that other parties involved felt that there were better more scalable solutions when it came to monitoring 50,000+ servers. Given my previous experience with Zabbix in smaller environments I think it could be done, but it would require a pretty significant time and money investment to get it going at the larger scale and there were other solutions that required less of an investment at this scale.
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