Item: Zabbix
Rating: 7
Author: Osman Gani

Overall Satisfaction with Zabbix

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We started to feel the need of a network monitoring tool few years back when one of our secondary core network connectivity with a partner got down somehow and we had no visibility over it until the next routine network check which was 24hours later! Secondary lines are our first line of defense if the primary one goes down, so we were at a great risk but as had no idea at all! so after going through some of the renowned monitoring tool we decided to go with Zabbix as it seemed well equipped with the features that we were looking for. Since then we are using Zabbix along with some other NMS to monitor our connectivity with most our valuable of partners. Zabbix is quite easy to deploy and manage and helps us tom easily identify if anything goes down or offline.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Zabbix can collect metrics from various sources. We have diffrent vendors firewall, router & switches and till now we did not face any issues while monitoring these devices.
It's very easy to deploy and moreover the monitoring dashboard is pretty simple to use and customize. We have customized the dashboard to highlight the core connectivity only and it helps us to monitor more efficiently.
The alerting system is my favorite part to be honest. We don't have to sit all day in front of the screen to monitor the networks. We get notifications through SMS which helps all of our team members to get aligned when anything goes down.
The widgets are highly customizable which helps us to monitor the important lines

Cons

Zabbix is a great tool and highly customizable, but the issue is most of the customization has to be done by the administrator which is not preferrable by all. I myself was not much happy with all the manual things at the beginning but gradually i liked it.
I have no complain about the dashboard but compared to the modern NMS, Zabbix feels bit backdated. I would suggest improving the dashboard UI as well.

Return on Investment

Investing in tools like Zabbix is always positive as it saves us from losing money or putting the organization at risk by not having proper visibility over the organizations network and system.

Usability

Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM) and SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Key Insights

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Zabbix go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Zabbix again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM), SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is well suited in SMB to enterprise grade environment, i think. It is also a great tool for those network admin who wants their NMS to be highly customizable as it supports various triggers, thresholds, and dependencies, which helps alerting and on time notifications for different teams. I would also suggest it to the system administrator for monitoring crucial server and systems.

Comments

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Easy to customize and monitor.