Zabbix a good solution if you have the time to dive in.
December 05, 2019

Zabbix a good solution if you have the time to dive in.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zabbix

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 Additionally, some services can report on further metrics, e.g. if files are outdated or show unreasonable behavior.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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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 one of the tools used to determine our SLA metrics.
  • It helps to show trends and upgrade the hardware before reaching a bottleneck.
  • The alerting framework allows to automatically action countermeasures in case something goes wrong.
We're using Munin in parallel to Zabbix, mostly out of legacy reasons. While Munin in the version used here only allows static graphs through image-files, Zabbix clearly wins here with the option to zoom in and out.
I used Nagios many years ago and it was quite similar to Zabbix. Since I haven't used it in a while, I don't know how it compares currently.
The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.

Do you think Zabbix delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Zabbix's feature set?

Yes

Did Zabbix live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Zabbix go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Zabbix again?

Yes

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.

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