Zabbix - The Monitoring Swiss Army Knife
April 04, 2017
Zabbix - The Monitoring Swiss Army Knife
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Zabbix
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 has become my go-to solution for information gathering on our hardware. It's very easy to create reports and graphs outlining any specific metric I'm asked to provide.
- Zabbix's alerting and script firing has made monitoring utilization on our network a breeze, while their alerting system allows me to fire off a different level of alert by the specific consecutive objects in an alert status. With time, I've been able to eliminate most end device alerts while just shooting off an alert for the problem at the root of an issue.
- Zabbix is easy enough to use at the user level to be handed to non-tech savvy people with minimal training.
- Nagios and Spiceworks
Zabbix had the best support for the devices I initially had in my network, its ability to adapt and change has made it my Swiss Army knife of monitoring tools. While it could benefit greatly from a moderated zabbix community, its support from the open source community has filled the whole rather well.