Zabbix Reviews

Monitoring systems and services that don't have their own solution in our environment. Single place to monitor multiple systems and processes. We monitor servers, websites, key card devices, etc..

Before we didn't really have a centrally managed monitoring solution, so adding this product has been a blessing as we are able to actively monitor and react accordingly. Being able to monitor almost any device in one location is extremely convenient.

The feature which I like the most would have to be the GUI. At first, I was put off, as I felt it was too complex or busy. Upon using it to setup devices, I found it was well laid out and has come a long way.

The agents are also very easy to install and manage, making this more of a turnkey solution for most.

I wish it had more options for personalizing the product, such as being able to include your company's logo without editing text files. More templates for specific devices.

More than three years.

None yet. Runs solid on very light resources.

Not yet, but as of now, it's a single server - might have to dive in at some point with the proxy configuration.

I have used publicly available resources. I can't comment on their customer service.

We used Cacti, which worked well for our uses. We moved because we needed a more updated solution that had support for a myriad of devices. The community is also active in development of plugins.

It's a decently complex system to get setup, it's not a simple package based system (well technically it is, but not as easy as others). It's also not as extreme as Nagios or Prometheus. We added Grafana, which made it a little more complex.

In-house team.

Time and knowledge. Without it, we wouldn't have known of current issues in our environments. It allows us to deep dive and get to the core issues quicker.

It's open source, so no cost/licensing needed.

Nagios, Prometheus, Check_MK, Adagios, Icinga 2, Zenoss, PRTG, and Cacti.

Zabbix coupled with Grafana (there's a plugin for Zabbix, very easy to setup), is a great monitoring stack. Leveraging "Let's Encrypt for SSL" is also a must!

We use Zabbix to monitor the configuration and usage of devices on the network, including switches and printers. 

Zabbix alerts us about problems on the system, including damage to the hardware or network connectivity issues.

I'm supervising all the IT departments, and Zabbix seems quite good for them. It provides graphics and information in real time. We get alerts about crashes on the system, enabling us to quickly repair issues. We can easily find devices with problems.

Zabbix is powerful, but it is difficult to understand initially. There are many things that can be improved, but we might not be using Zabbix to its fullest extent. The software has more features than we need.

For example, Zabbix can be used for a company monitoring solutions by many vendors. We have only one site and one company, so we can't improve all the possibilities of the software.

Zabbix could add some more cybersecurity features. It isn't the same thing because network monitoring isn't the same as security. Still, it could include something like a VPN or firewall with the solution. It's a free software tool traditionally used for monitoring. 

I have been using Zabbix for around one year.

Zabbix is highly stable.

I rate six out of 10 for scalability.

We don't use technical support. We rely on the documentation. 

We previously used Centreon, another open-source solution, about four years ago. I wasn't used to this kind of software, but now I can understand them a little bit better.

I rate Zabbix five out of 10 for ease of setup. It takes about two weeks to deploy. We have many people working from home, which creates some difficulties. Sometimes, people left materials at home when they work at the office, and we didn't have the time to install all the components. That's why it took time.

We saved time one equipment intervention, preventing service outages. We had the information about network blackouts before they happened, so we could save our company by changing equipment before we experienced downtime. 

Zabbix is an open-source solution, and there aren't any additional costs.

I rate Zabbix eight out of 10. It's a good solution for everyone's needs. Maybe same users that we have, few users for the moment because we don't have a very big important network. I think that Centreon is better, but maybe easier than the subjects to use. This is maybe the best solution for small entities.

We develop applications in Python and we use Zabbix for the monitoring of the network for people connecting to the bank.

We have many proxy servers using this solution.

The overall functionality of Zabbix is very good. The monitoring of bank applications that Zabbix provides is great. The information is displayed on a dashboard that is easily viewed.

The customization of Zabbix is easier than with other solutions, such as DX Spectrum. We need to send requirements to the vendor for DX Spectrum to do the customization for us. In Zabbix, we can create a template by ourselves, and we do not need to send any information to the vendor This is a large advantage of using this solution.

There are some features of Zabbix that are not good for reporting. The DX Spectrum solution has better reporting.

In a future release, they should add a NetFlow feature, and improve the dashboard templates.

I have used Zabbix for approximately one year.

We use a SQL database on the server and sometimes the performance of Zabbix is not the best. We have upgraded our servers to Oracle and the performance is okay. When we were using DX Spectrum we did not have any stability issues.

We have an application for mobile banking and we have ten million accounts running, we are large in Thailand.

We have approximately 75 people using the solution at one time.

My team has contacted support from Zabbix but they have very expensive. However, our management is still considering using the support.

The support from DX Spectrum we have not been happy with here in Thailand. They only have sales teams and not someone who can provide useful technical support.

We have used DX Spectrum previously and it was stable in operation in WAN and LAN networks.

The initial setup of Zabbix was complex and took us approximately one year to fully complete.

We did the implementation ourselves for the production and distribution.

We have five people who do the maintenance and support of Zabbix.

Zabbix is a free solution but the support contact costs money.

The license for DX Spectrum is expensive.

I rate Zabbix a seven out of ten.

We needed a tool to know what the space inside of the infrastructure is like. My work was to use Zabbix to get information about the IT infrastructure in the village or in the towns that are very far from the headquarters. I had to use Zabbix to provide information with maps that the IT was working and so that the headquarters can see in real-time what the healyh of the IT infrastructure we had deployed in the electrical network is.

After this experience, I tried Zabbix in african organization based in my country and it was used to monitor the IT infrastructures in three countries, cameroon, benin and ivory coast. For the moment, Zabbix is not yet very popular here but I really appreciate it and really want to make people know that it's very simple to use. 

In 2023 i tried Zabbix 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9. And news features like pdf report have improved my Admin Sys routine.

Zabbix has improved the daily monitoring tasks by making them easier and faster.

The feature that I find most valuable is the stateful map. In fact, the Zabbix map designing tools permit to make monitoring stateful maps with topologies similar to the reals IT network maps.

My company wanted to do an exercise command to access IT from Cameroon. They wanted to access an FSS to a second host with second equipment that was on another coast but it is not possible on Zabbix to do it. They want to directly access from the front-end of Zabbix to access a prompt in Zabbix to an access terminal. In the front-end, there is no way to do that. That would be an important improvement. 

II have been using this product for seven years.

It is very scalable because I tried version 5. I used 5 from 0 and I see that they have improved many things, but there is not yet this option to have an access terminal where you have many functionalities. 

The scalability works fine because the community is very active. When a new version comes out, we can see that they have tried to add.

The technical support is very quick. When I have a problem and I post it in the community, they answer me very quickly. For now, i don't need any technical support. 

Positive

In fact, even if I have looked at Nagios first, before Zabbix I did not really use it or any other monitoring solution.

The initial setup was very quick. The first time it was long because I didn't know it yet. I was only using Windows. The first time was very difficult because of the operating system. 

I implement Zabbix in-house with as outsourcing offficials webs tutorials

Zabbix exploitation has dispensed with financing frequent visits to the technical area through alerts, notifications, and stateful maps. Thus, the return on investment is more than 100%.

Zabbix is an effective cheaper network monitoring solution because it doesn't need any ongoing cost due to licensing.

Before choosing Zabbix, we evaluated Nagios but we were not comfortable with notifications messages syntax and configurations.

I would recommend Zabbix to people who want to monitor a simple network.

I have found that the literature on the website is not very easy for some people. They want to be in those to read more about Zabbix, how to install it, and what the normal problems are.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

• Monitor network assets
• Data links
• Disk space
• Physical servers
• More than 1k virtual machines
• Websites
• Logins into automated systems

• Assertive monitoring
• Customized messages
• Configurable screens
• Division by teams
• Customizable alerts
• Automated call opening
• Mobile connections
• Iintegrations

The discovery functionality is most valuable. Every new asset placed in the environment can be automatically detected, predicting human failures.

The product is already great. Wanting something more could take the focus off the product. However, the correlation of events would be a wonderful addition.

I have been using this solution for more than eight years.

We had no issues.

There are no scalability issues. The components scale.

We have not had any events that the team has not resolved.

The system has good documentation and a community full of talent. 

Positive

I have already used Nagios and PRTG. After using Zabbix, I did not try new tools. I adapted and believe it would be difficult to convert all the rules to another system.

It is easy to deploy. The installation process is well-documented.

The implementation was carried out by an internal team. We acquired knowledge by reading manuals.

It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation.

I had very good references for Zabbix, but I did have a look at Pandora FMS and Nagios.

I believe in the system's potential.

I'm currently dealing with three implementations - two are on cloud and one is on-premise. Our clients use the solution to monitor IT infrastructures, IT networks, applications, and cloud as well as containers.

I have a very exciting additional use case as well that we're working on, using Zabbix 5.x for internet of things (IOT) monitoring. It supports MQTT and ModBus, which allows us to monitor IOT devices.

The flexibility of taking monitoring data from such a wide variety of platforms - beyond traditional IT - makes Zabbix a highly flexible solution.

I'm a consultant of this solution as well as a user. I'm a Zabbix certified professional and director of a Zabbix authorized reseller (Nobius) in the UK. 

As our business has grown, we use Zabbix to monitor our Zabbix implementations - a 'manager of managers' setup. This has given us better resource utilisation and improved our service delivery.

The ability to take data from multiple sources. The Zabbix agent is probably the most lightweight monitoring agent available. The agent itself is extensible providing simple expansion capabilities to support new use cases. Alongside the built-in agentless monitoring via SNMP, SSH, WMI and others, this means we have a solution that has  no limits as to the data that can be ingested and alerted on.

If anything could be improved, it would be some of the terminology that is used in the documentation. The documentation is good, but it's been translated into English and occasionally suffers from terminology issues. There are additional features that the commercial software has that Zabbix doesn't. Full AIOps isn't cheap, things like machine learning and artificial intelligence attract a massive price premium and are rarely implemented properly. But they are major, major features.

I've been working with Zabbix for over four years following 25yrs as an IT Monitoring specialist within user organisations, consultancies and major global software vendors.

The stability is unparalleled. Processes are all well-behaved and logging is clear and succinct. Support for separating the front end, server and database allow resources to be load-balanced and clustered.

Zabbix runs equally well in cloud- and on-premise configurations.

The solution can take hundreds and thousands of values per second, so scalability is excellent. The ability to add proxy servers to distribute the data handling load is impressive and they are very straightforward to set up. This also adds to reliability in distributed environments.

If you consider that Zabbix is open source, their technical support is fantastic because the people, the developers of the application, are the guys who do the technical support as well. You don't have to wait to get through different levels of technical support. You get a very, very knowledgeable person on the phone straight away which is a big plus.

Positive

Yes, previously used and consulted on HPE SiteScope, HPE Operations Manager, Micro Focus Operations Bridge and others.

Sitescope is useful, but doesn't have the muli-tenancy or proxy facilities and is agentless only making it unjustifiable in an MSP environment.

Operations Manager was too complex to maintain and became obsolete.

Operations Bridge is resource hungry, complex to install and configure and extremely expensive.

I've deployed so many times that the initial setup is straightforward, but I would say that for someone who is totally inexperienced in Linux, it can be a little time consuming. If you understand a little about Linux, then it's no problem. A full system can easily be configured in two hours but it took two days the first time I did it. If you're not a technical person you can still install it but it will likely take some time.

As an example, configuring SNMP trapping into Zabbix needs configuration outside of Zabbix itself. This is not complex, but can slow down the process for inexperienced installers.

The software itself is open source, it can be easily downloaded,  and use it with no limitations.

Be very careful about using the "appliance" configuration in a production environment. It is only suitable for evaluation or very small environments.

Invest in support, training and consultancy from Zabbix or from third parties. Architecting a robust, resilient and secure monitoring platform from day 1 will save time and money at a later stage.

Zabbix and 3rd parties offer far more than a traditional support contract. No other organisation in my experience includes pro-active and on-site support as a core part of their offerings. 

Nagios - too much development effort to maintain and configure.

I believe it's crucial to plan the implementation. Just because the software is free, you shouldn't just install it and let it run. Plan your implementation carefully and you'll get more out of it than you ever thought possible

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

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 use it to monitor Linux systems. It has performed well.

We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes. 

Graphing processes. It can send messages to our ticketing system. It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.

I would like to better be able to monitor Oracle processes.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

I have not used technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution, so I asked my manager to look into it.

I was involved in the initial setup. The initial setup was straightforward.

We evaluated SCOM.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Features
2. Price.