Zabbix Reviews

We monitor Zabbix for different clients. In total, there are less than 40 users, using this solution. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and continue using Zabbix.

I have been using this solution for the past few months. 

It hasn't really been that stable, but I think that has a lot to do with the specs. It could be more stable.

Zabbix is scalable.

I would absolutely recommend Zabbix to others. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Zabbix a rating of eight. Once I have more experience with it, maybe I'll give it a higher rating. 

This is a network monitoring solution that I was playing around with to see if it would meet my needs.

Zabbix helped me to identify issues on the system, as well as ports that were open.

The most valuable feature is the support for monitoring Cisco switches. It is easy to use because there is a free template for it included.

The main problem with Zabbix is that you have to spend time writing templates for all of the products that you have. It would work great if I had the time to do it, but considering that I have all kinds of different devices, I don't want to spend the time doing it.

If they included more prebuilt templates of devices that are in use today, then it would be very helpful. For example, they have a template for a SonicWall 3600, but they don't have one for a SonicWall Tz300. They do have some base templates but they are not customized for these specific products. For some products, I was able to download one, but not for all of them.

The documentation needs to be improved.

The deployment is complex and should be simpler to complete.

I have been using Zabbix for about a month.

Once the product is started, it is stable.

I didn't really test the scalability. For me, it wasn't scalable because I only used it for the devices for which I had templates. I was the only person who was using it.

I did not contact technical support.

I was using Kaseya Traverse, which I bought because I have a large Kaseya installation. I thought that it would monitor sFlow, but it didn't, so I returned it and then replaced it with LogicMonitor.

Basically, the problem was that in order to support sFlow, I would have to have a virtual machine for each of the network switches that I wanted to monitor. So if I had 50 switches then I would need 50 virtual machines to monitor sFlow. When they told me that it supports sFlow, then technically, they are correct. However, what they didn't tell me was that for each switch, you have to create a separate collector, which didn't make any sense.

With SolarWinds NetFlow, you can have multiple switches with one collector.

After I downloaded Zabbix, it was a pain to set up. I would say that it is complex in terms of the instructions. I was getting errors, and apparently, I was not the only one. I had to look at two or three different websites to get it set up. I found that if you follow the steps that come with it, which were not very detailed, it did not work. I had to search through different forums in order to figure out the error that I was getting. By the time I had finished, it took me three or four hours to figure out why I was getting the errors, and I had to reinstall it four times in the process.

In total, I would say that the deployment took at least 12 hours.

I completed the deployment myself.

I was using the free, Community Edition.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zabbix is to seek the help of somebody who has actually done it before. Otherwise, it's not worth their time. Also, find somebody who can provide you with the templates that you need, or who's got familiarity with building them. It is a good solution if you have the time to build the templates and figure it all out. This requires knowledge of SNMP, as well as all of the devices. Then, you have to put it into XML and create a template that Zabbix can use. It is not a straightforward solution.

The reason that I stopped using Zabbix and bought LogicMonitor is not that it didn't work well. Rather, I needed a solution that was complete, where I didn't have to do the development.

I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

The solution is open-source. 

The infrastructure monitoring is great. Then, Zabbix being open-source, and with the whole platform, we have good network monitoring there. You have these ping monitors, synthetic monitors, that are really helpful.

The solution can scale well.

Technical support is great.

The pricing of the product is reasonable.

For internal monitoring and network monitoring the solution is really good.

It's open-source software, and due to that, they really don't have legacy service monitorings like APM, or build-on capabilities, and the pure part of the transaction-related data. It is good for internal network monitoring, however, it's not for the service we are monitoring, microservices.

The stability could be better.

Basically, they need to provide automated monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and then APM monitoring as well as more on microservices or technology space, maybe like Java, .NET, Datadog, et cetera - these kinds of add-on instrumentations. They need to work somewhat on the dashboard and alerting side. Dashboards are not that good. They can improve on them.

With Zabbix, I just started as an open-source strategy moving from the enterprise version. It has been six months.

It's not extremely stable. 

n terms of infrastructure, you have to tune based on your requirements. You're monitoring 1,000 or 10,000 systems, so it depends on what you're monitoring, and you have to tune it. They don't have a tuning table or sizing recommendations. However, they have the beta version of it. Certainly, on the console side, they need to improve a lot in terms of stability and performance, and bottlenecks of the product. Whatever data we process with Zabbix goes to Postgre or MySQL. Right now, we are trying to use Postgre. They are using it to do a lot of time scaling stuff so that we can support SQL data. However, it seems like they have limitations with the Postgre database.

The solution is scalable. We have admins and users and 50 IT people on it. However, the systems we are monitoring are more than 10,000. You can monitor more than 10,000 UIs. That's our target.

We are using the open-source version and therefore we don't get technical support. However, if someone wants to opt for it, they can get it and technical support is great, even though we haven't used it yet.

The pricing is very reasonable. Zabbix is very cheap. Compared to other tools like Nagios and others, Zabbix is very cheap.

If a company wants to implement the solution, I suggest they go with the latest version. It is a stable version. Preferably they should use it with the database, and not the AWS database, as it doesn't give you time scaling. You have to install your own Postgre and you can apply the time scaling feature in that. That way, you can add your data competition to Zabbix. 

You have to do a lot of tuning on cache and view sizing. If your clients are on a remote site, you usually use proxies. Therefore, data will be sent to proxies, and then from proxies, it will be sent to the server. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Infrastructure monitoring.

Excellent monitoring tool.

Auto-config.

Multitenancy.

It has various features, I like its versatility the most.

It not only provides the preconfigured item monitoring feature, but it is also easy to configure custom items.

The template is another valuable feature, because hosts can be easily added.

My organization can get a proper alarm when some issues occur on a system.

Even though it’s such a powerful monitoring system, it would be more helpful if it had a flexible UI.

I have used this solution for more than three years.

There were no stability issues experienced, it’s so stable.

There were no scalability issues.

I’ve never used technical support because it is free.

I did the setup by referring to its documentation and that was enough.

It’s free of cost.

I checked Nagios, but I didn’t seriously evaluate it.

The documentation has all the information you need.

We use Ubuntu for the distribution of our products and our web application firewall. Previously, I have also used a desktop version of Ubuntu on my laptop. We use this operating system for our Zabbix server as well, for monitoring, testing, and so on. 

We mostly use a server version, so it's only a command console. There's no graphical interface. 

This solution is deployed both on-premise and on cloud. 

Like other common Linux distributions, some of the most valuable features of this solution are the ease of use and deployment. It's simple and has a lot of packages and a lot of software. 

As far as improvements, sometimes I get a bit frustrated when I move from a previous version to a new one because some configuration has changed—I need to investigate the documentation to deal with some configuration. But it doesn't take much time, so it's okay. 

I don't have any requests for additional features. 

I have been using Ubuntu Linux for a little over 10 years. 

Ubuntu is stable. 

This solution is scalable, but the scalability is more appropriate for hardware, not for the operating system. 

In my company, there are only a few users dealing with the desktop version of the Ubuntu operating system. As far as production environments and testing servers, there are maybe a few dozen users. 

We have never contacted technical support. We've never had any problems which demanded support from the Ubuntu teams. 

Before using Ubuntu Linux, I used CentOS, Debian, and Kali Linux. 

The installation is really easy. The timeframe depends on the hardware speed, so it's rather fast. I handled the installation by myself. 

We don't actually have a technical team specific to Ubuntu—they're all IT guys, so we all have good skills for doing things ourselves. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

I'm surprised that Ubuntu Linux has a paid license, even some supporting stuff included. We don't use the paid version, we only use the common edition. 

I rate Ubuntu Linux a 10 out of 10. It's really great. I recommend Ubuntu Linux to others who are looking into implementing this OS.