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Zabbix Power Users
July 25, 2018

Zabbix Power Users

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zabbix

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 has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.
Zabbix is a great, free solution. While not everything is discovered and configured out of the box, it is a powerful tool that allows for complete customization to what your organization needs as far as a monitoring solution. We've invested the time to make Zabbix powerful, and while it doesn't upgrade or maintain itself, it continues to demonstrate a positive ROI compared to off the shelf tools.
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.