Zabbix Reviews

As a network services provider we use Zabbix to monitor network infrastructure and customer services. I have also set instances for a number of government institutions to monitor their entire ICT Infrastructure. I will focus on the largest instances, the service provider use cases.

I used Zabbix to monitor network devices, servers, databases, virtual machines, services and applications. For the network services provider, I run an instance for our internal infrastructure and another instance for monitoring our customer services so they can have access to monitor the state and status of their services, SLA, view utilization graphs on demand or in real time and produce needed reports and also receive alerts when problems happen

We could easily monitor anything on our infrastructure and customer services using Zabbix as a consolidated solution for all the network infrastructure and customer services monitoring needs , as Zabbix is highly flexible and customizable to fit the specific needs of organizations.

Zabbix has greatly improved  operations and maintenance by helping management and technical teams be more proactive. They can easily spot problems or undesired states on the infrastructure or customer services

With the Zabbix out-of-box multitenancy support,  customers can have restricted access to their service utilizations and other operational data in real time or on demand. The feedback from customers shows they are very happy and they appreciate how easy it is to learn using it.

Time to work on issues is greatly reduced, as Zabbix provides powerful alerts and details into what is happening in our network. Issues that could take weeks to resolve can now easily be spotted in a few minutes as all essential metrics for all devices are monitored in real time.

Zabbix fits well with the multi-vendor environment and it has a lot of out-of-box templates that can be customized to fit our needs.

We can easily provide infrastructure status reports with Zabbix. We can produce reports even for old devices that were not properly and consistently monitored since they were installed.

Zabbix is highly customizable and flexible, which makes it easy to have all our monitoring needs accommodated. Many elements like auto-discovery, dashboards, templates, graphs, maps, metrics, SLA's can easily be customized to fit specific needs

Zabbix has a powerful API that support integration with third party software, automation and creating new applications. It can be easily integrated with other  tools as a data ingest, processing or visualization platform. The API allows for utilizing better software in specific areas that Zabbix may be lacking like Grafana which allows for more customizable dashboards.

Auto Discovery and Custom Actions are greatly helpful in doing mass discovery, the grouping of hosts, and templates association. The flexibility in setting discovery rules and actions is really helpful for complicated use cases.

Multi-tenancy support which a result of granular use roles, automatic actions, tags, and host grouping. User permissions can be limited to specific sections, services, applications, device groups, access level etc. This has proven to be very helpful for our customer's services monitoring instance.

Out-of-box templates that are customizable, can be changed or modified to suit specific use cases. Additional items can be added to these templates and more filtering or pre-processing rules can be specified in these templates

It has an intuitive UI with beautiful graphs and customizable maps. Although more powerful solutions can be used, Zabbix caters for all our needs in that area as it provides the flexibility we need.

Zabbix provides regular updates and a clear and timed roadmap. Very helpful as our c company can see whether  expectations will be taken care in coming releases of the software.

Although Zabbix is great, the documentation is a bit lacking. The documentation gets a bit messy between versions and is not too detailed, the learning curve is steep and can be difficult for first-timers, especially when they run into issues.

Zabbix depends on other open-source projects, so it would be a good idea to add more information on fine-tuning a Zabbix instance especially the essential details when working with specific choices of OS, database, webserver etc. I had to do most of the things with limited resources in the fine-tuning of the database, OS, and other packages. Although not entirely a Zabbix issue it is a good idea to provide guidance on the basics.

Automatic maps. It would be great if Zabbix could create automatic topology maps using discovery protocols like LLDP or CDP.

Automatic Updates of host templates. It would save a lot of time if that could be done with new releases while keeping personal configurations intact.

Out of box high availability setting for all sections of Zabbix

I have been using Zabbix for four years

This is a very stable solution. It is a low maintenance solution and if finetuned and optimized properly can handle a heavy workload with minimum resources.

This product is highly scalable.  HA and redundancy can be set for database, proxy and front-end.

Zabbix experts provide great ideas on the open-source forums for the products. The Zabbix community, including the CEO and the technical experts, are friendly. Since they are doing great with the community, I am confident they are doing great with their optional Technical Support which we have not subscribed to.

Positive

I had used other solutions before but the licensing was too expensive for our company and still, other solutions were limited because we have a multi-vendor environment.

The setup is a bit complex but can be done with the right  skills. More important than the initial setup is optimization and finetuning which requires multiple skills.

We implemented it in-house. I primarily worked on the database, Zabbix server, Zabbix proxy, frontend and other server side stuff. I also prepared agent and SNMP configuration scripts for other Engineers to implement on network devices and servers.

I can confidently say that our ROI is 100%.

Zabbix is open-source so if one wishes to implement it in-house, they must have qualified professionals to set up and optimize databases, Linux/Unix OS, PHP, Apache, and depending on what is monitored, a full-stack network and systems administrator may be needed.

Zabbix provides support although we have not subscribed to the support. We implemented the instances on our own and we also operate and maintain them on our own.

We had to evaluate several options including SolarWinds NPM, PRTG, OpenNMS, Cacti, Nagios, and Zenoss Core. We used Huawei U2000, Cisco Prime and PRTG for some devices before we switched to Zabbix.

Overall, Zabbix is a great product. I have been using it for almost two years, and I am very happy with it.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring issues and availability.

This product is very easy to deploy. It is easy to deploy as a Docker if you do not want to do a full deployment. 

The initial setup, while not simple, is easier than other products.

It offers native support of VMware ESXi integration.

The solution is stable.

It's free; it's open-source. 

The documentation has been very useful. The community is quite helpful as well. 

The networking monitor is not too easy to work with. It's like switch monitoring. It's okay, yet not perfect. It's something they could improve on. I'm still using SmokePing since the network monitoring isn't so great.

The initial setup isn't exactly easy.

I've been using the solution for one year. 

I've found the product to be quite stable and reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. I do not have issues with it crashing or freezing. 

I cannot speak to the scalability of the product. My scale is quite small. I've never reached the limit o the server. 

I'm the only one who uses the product right now. I only use it in my personal lab and therefore have no plans to expand usage right now. 

I've never dealt with technical support. I cannot say how helpful or responsive they are. 

A long time ago, I used Zenoss. Zenoss basically focused more on larger enterprises. The community version of Zenoss was less well-maintained. Zabbix has a better community. That was a major reason for switching. 

The implementation process was okay. No monitoring tool is easy, I would say. It's not extremely easy, and yet, it's not extremely complex like some of the other tools. There's a moderate level of complexity during deployment. The entire process takes a couple of hours.

For my level of usage, I only need one person, and that is me, to handle any maintenance tasks. 

I handled the implementation personally. I did not need the help of or use integrators or consultants.

In terms of ROI, it's been providing faster troubleshooting when there are issues. It provides a good dashboard to show global health. 

This is an open-source product, which makes it free to use. 

I'm a customer and end-user. 

We're currently using the latest update of the product. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We primarily use it for monitoring, but also for some other things.

In terms of customization and integration, we have more flexibility. We can automate configurations, define deletion rules, and customize based on your needs. The client interface allows for further configuration, making it quite comprehensive.

Architecturally, we can even extend to the cloud using Suncoast servers and proxy servers to communicate with WorkRock or the supervisor. The compatible database list makes configuration straightforward.

User-friendliness is another strong point. We have a customizable dashboard. We can define metrics directly in the web portal, avoiding editing configuration files. This provides several advantages, especially when managing multiple collections.

There are areas of improvement. The database grows really fast. So, when you install Zabbix, you have to deal with some issues, like the database. We become pretty big very fast. 

This leads to optimization challenges, requiring manual deletion of network components like SNMP. We should work with SNMP. It's not as simple as configuring the host incident.

Configuration can also be difficult. The use of a workflow in the configuration of items or triggers makes it difficult to use an item in a mature way. It's hard to set up a dynamic workflow. While workflows exist, setting them up for specific data sources like network items can be a hurdle. You may need to find alternative methods, which isn't ideal.

For some customers, there are some personal customization challenges. But, for me, it's okay.

I have been using this solution for a year. We use version 6.0, which is the next recommended version. We don't do long-term tests, so it is a middle version.

The latest long-term support version we're using is 6.1.0.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

There are around less than 20 end users in the company. These include admins, managers, and engineers. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

I work with the public community like a public forum. So, when I have a request, I use the public community forums. We usually find solutions within a day or two, depending on availability.

Neutral

There are many options available. Today, you can use alternatives that provide better-detailed information. For instance, we have alerts concerning specific issues. I'm using Azure as part of this organizational setup. 

In Zabbix, for metrics, the latest release is better, and we can also find some metrics. Essentially, we don't incur any cost of the same magnitude. In Zabbix, images allow us to view the bot system today for Windows, Linux, infrastructure, and networking processes.

The installation itself took about one to two hours. The lack of clear step-by-step procedures. There are procedures, but they're not very detailed or user-friendly.

There is a team of admins to supervise the product. 

Zabbix itself is free, but professional support is paid. They have different pricing tiers based on the category and enterprise level. You can find the detailed pricing policy on their website.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use it to collaborate with each other internally as a company for video conferencing, meetings, teams, and those kinds of things. We implement it in customer environments as well for the same reasons, and also for eHealth solutions, for instance, in hospitals.

It improves the way we work, the way our customers work. With eHealth, for instance, surgeons can make appointments with patients at a distance and they can still see each other. That's very, very good.

The most valuable aspect is it's very robust. It has a lot of features and it also integrates with a lot of the Cisco hardware around it, such as Smartboards, video conferencing units, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a really robust and complete solution.

The initial setup is easy.

It's a stable solution.

We find the product scalable. 

The use is very straightforward. It's actually pretty much ready to go out of the box. It's very easy to start using it, to be honest.

You can also integrate it without Microsoft Office 365 and put it in the agenda of Outlook for instance, for meetings.

They've already added extra features, such as noise-canceling and facial recognition, which is great.

One of the things we don't like is that Zabbix has a license structure with a price that is high compared to the competition. It's very high, for example, compared to something like Microsoft Teams.

We have used the product since Cisco acquired it. It's been maybe ten years or so at this point.

The stability is great. There aren't bugs. It's not glitchy and it doesn't freeze. it's reliable.

The scalability on offer is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

All of our people in the company in Europe use Zabbix for sure. That's at least 1,000. We also use it for events to stream video content, to customers, for instance, on a fairly large scale.

Technical support is very good. We have straight contact with the Cisco technical assistance center. If there is anything that has to be changed or improved, then we can directly call them.

We previously used Microsoft Teams. The number of possibilities in Zabbix was better than in Teams, and it also integrates very well with the hardware solutions from Cisco which was why we switched.

In general, the initial setup is very straightforward. It's not a difficult implementation process.

There isn't much staff needed for deployment or maintenance tasks. 

If more functionality is added to it, that might be a reason to use it more and more. However, as it is, at this point, we are already intensive users.

We buy the solution yearly. I'm not very aware of what the actual pricing and the licensing are, however, I know that for extra features, there is a possibility to buy a little bit more.

We looked at Zoom, however, we never ended up using it. 

Currently, we use it and we implement it as a partner.

We're always on the latest version. It's automatically updated via the cloud.

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

Generally, it is used for infrastructure and network monitoring. We've been using it for monitoring systems and application infrastructure. It goes through the whole stack, and that's what we like about it. It can also be extended, but I wouldn't consider that as the primary use case. 

It can be deployed on-premise as well as on the cloud. It is meant to be on-premise, but some providers like us can use Zabbix on the cloud and provide it as a SaaS model. It is predominantly deployed on-premise. We mainly use versions 4.x and 5.x.

Just like any monitoring tool, the major benefits would be being proactive about and avoiding downtime and being able to do capacity planning of the infrastructure. It is about having more knowledge about what you own in terms of infrastructure. Once you do that, you're able to make educated decisions. They are not guesswork.

Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring.

Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources. 

Its UI should be improved. They did some improvements in version 5, but it could benefit from some more work. 

Its integrations should also be improved. They've been active for one year, and they seem to have noticed that. It has new integrations, but it could benefit from more integrations. 

As far as I know, there is no model to push statistics, metrics, or events towards Zabbix. This type of API isn't yet there, whereas some other tools provide an API for this.

We have been using this solution for around five years.

It is very stable. We've had it in our customer environments for four years, and the only thing we had to do was to tune the database because we have more metrics. It never went down. 

One of our customers is monitoring a few hundred devices. It can be used for a few thousand devices without much complexity, but beyond that, it is difficult to scale. We don't use Zabbix beyond that, and we try to avoid it for larger deployments. You can create a distributed setup that helps with scalability. They have a distributed collector and a proxy that can be used for that.

It doesn't consume a lot of resources and is efficient in terms of performance. You can put it on a Raspberry Pi and monitor a few devices. If you push performance to the limit and have too many devices, I'm not sure how good it is then.

Our customers have subscribed to technical support, but they never really used their technical support. Zabbix has never failed. Our guarantee had expired, and we started our own maintenance on top of Zabbix with some government clients, but we never had to use Zabbix support.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. You need prior knowledge of Linux, but you don't need specific knowledge of Zabbix to deploy it. It is really straightforward and lightweight. Its deployment could take as little as one hour per person.

You simply download the packages. For a small deployment, you install them in the same box. There are three main components that you have to put in the same place, and that's it. It is not really complex to set up. Zabbix isn't really geared like some of the other solutions where there are different modules for each part. Zabbix is monolithic. You have a core system that can do everything, and it is extended with the plugins that provide additional integration and monitoring, but the framework and the UI are in one package or software.

You definitely need someone to administer the platform after it is deployed. Otherwise, it is a bad deal. The number of people required for maintenance depends on the site. It can start with someone part-time, and it can end with two full-time persons developing scripts and plugins. Post-deployment maintenance also depends on the monitoring requirements. You can't have a monitoring solution that is central to your network and sees everything but doesn't change as your network changes. If your network changes, your solution has to adapt to it, which is normal for all monitoring solutions. Similarly, if you have too many metrics, you would require some database tuning as the solution gets bigger. 

It is open source. If you want to have a subscription or official support, you can pay for it. They have different plans, which are not that expensive. The plans are based on per monitoring server, not per monitored equipment. So, it is not at all expensive, and you can also live without the support if you want a cheaper option.

We evaluated different solutions in 2012 and  2017. We favor open-source solutions or open-core solutions that support open-source models. These open-core solutions are not open source, but they have an open model. They come with plugins. Such solutions are the best because they offer flexibility, and you can add your own monitoring on top of them. You can add your own plugins and extend a solution beyond its original capabilities. A proprietary solution such as SolarWinds is not that flexible because it is closed. You have to find a suitable plugin or module, but you can't really develop something on top of it. There is an SDK, but it is really hard to use. I've never rarely seen it used.

Zabbix is a solution we offer to answer some of the main customer monitoring requirements . The solution that we go for depends on the environment in which it will be used. We select one of these depending on a customer's environment and prerequisites. We see whether a customer's environment is really rich, and how many customized and standard applications a customer has. Zabbix also has more integrations with on-prem infrastructure and cloud solutions.

In comparison with Nagios and alike solutions, Zabbix is less fragmented providing better integrated components. They also invested in the last years quite a lot of development efforts to build new custom integrations.

I would advise others to know scripting and Linux administration. These are the prerequisites. If you don't know these, you either have to get better at them or get an expert to help you. After this solution is deployed, you should have someone to administer the platform. Do not leave the platform as it is. It should evolve with the network. Otherwise, it becomes irrelevant.

I would rate Zabbix a nine out of ten. It is a very good product, and it is for a good reason that we have chosen Zabbix as part of our monitoring portfolio.

We have two Zabbix servers, deployed locally and in our New York datacenter, and we use them for monitoring traffic. It is an order processing system and we need to schedule and monitor our infrastructure.

Zabbix is very easy to implement.

The interface is customizable, so we can create the dashboard that we need.

We need to set it up step by step in order to ensure that it is stable and works properly.

If you want to use all of the features then you have to pay a licensing fee.

I have been using Zabbix for approximately one year.

We use Zabbix on a daily basis and we haven't had any issues with stability.

We have not needed to expand it because our infrastructure is very small. It includes a server and some VMs.

When we have a problem, we search the web site for how to resolve it. We have never had an issue that necessitated contacting technical support.

In my last job, I worked with Nagios. I found that Zabbix is a good system for monitoring and it is easier to implement, and it is also less expensive.

The initial setup is easy to do. It involves implementing agents in the server, but it is not difficult.

We implemented it with our in-house team that is also responsible for maintenance. This includes updates to the product. There is a team of three administrators who manage it.

Zabbix is free but if you use it in production then you have to pay for it. It is not expensive if you compare it to something like the Amazon monitoring system.

Also, it is an open-source product, although some features are available at an extra cost.

Overall, this is a great tool and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use the solution for network monitoring and status monitoring.

The calculations part is the most valuable. 

Improvement is needed as per customer requirements.

I have been using Zabbix for some time. 

It is a stable solution. 

The scalability is nine out of ten. It is recommended for medium enterprises. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes two to three years. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine point five out of ten. 

I use Zabbix to monitor the threats in the IT infrastructure. 

Zabbix helps to save time. 

The solution needs to add remote features. 

I have been using the solution since 2017. 

I rate Zabbix's stability an eight out of ten. 

My company has 20 users for the product, but around 60 people enjoy the benefits of it. I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

I have yet to reach out to the support. 

Zabbix's installation is easy. It is also easy for customization. 

The tool's licensing costs are yearly. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.