Zabbix gives you flexibility, but there's a cost associated with it.
December 01, 2015
Zabbix gives you flexibility, but there's a cost associated with it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Zabbix
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).
- Decreased response time for incidents which in-turn increased service availability.
- Ability to create/execute scripts to allow for self healing of simple problems.
- Graphs gave us the ability to see trending to better forecast our needs for budgeting and purchasing.
I'm mostly familiar with Zabbix, but I've also started working with OpenNMS more recently. It appears that they're very comparable, the major difference being that OpenNMS supports SNMP Traps natively and can import MIBs which I was never able to figure out with Zabbix. Like I've said earlier, Zabbix worked great for me in a small/medium business where I had time to carefully craft templates for each of the few makes/models we were using, but when looking at a large enterprise I've had better luck with OpenNMS where we can just import the manufacturer provided MIBs, but that also comes at a cost where as far as I know you don't have some of the advantages of the Zabbix Agent running on the host itself and the additional flexibility that comes along with that.
In summary Zabbix's main strength comes from the fact that if you can script it you can monitor it, but that also comes at a cost since you have to be willing to put in the time to get everything setup just the way you want it. The competition seems to be easier to setup/start using out of the box, but Zabbix in my experience is more flexible. So depending on your needs choose the solution that best fits your needs.
In summary Zabbix's main strength comes from the fact that if you can script it you can monitor it, but that also comes at a cost since you have to be willing to put in the time to get everything setup just the way you want it. The competition seems to be easier to setup/start using out of the box, but Zabbix in my experience is more flexible. So depending on your needs choose the solution that best fits your needs.