Zabbix Reviews

We use Zabbix to monitor our physical, virtual, and network infrastructure.

Zabbix is our primary infrastructure monitoring and alerting tool. Thanks to Zabbix metrics we are not just notified of failures, but we have enough data for preventive maintenance optimization and capacity planning of our compute infrastructure.

The low-level discovery feature that lets us auto-configure the monitoring for various systems is a valuable feature.

The option for multiple monitoring protocols - we are using the native agent and SNMP - is valuable.

The flexibility to view and log the data history is valuable.

We can create custom metrics easily using the Zabbix sender utility. 

The quality of the templates (typically offered by third parties) is often poor, and they contain bugs. I encourage the Zabbix users to understand the template structure to be able to improve them.

The setup process for certain integrations can be challenging and there is potential for them to be improved or at least better documented.

The creation of custom metrics could be simplified.

Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting.

I have been using Zabbix for two years.

Zabbix is very stable.

Zabbix meets our needs well for our small infrastructure of about 40 physical and 60 virtual systems.

We only used the product documentation, which could be better.

Zabbix was our first choice for infrastructure monitoring. We are using Prometheus/Grafana stack for metrics from other environments.

The setup process has a steep learning curve. The documentation provided lacks detail, and I encountered some difficulties during the integration steps. It took me a few hours to set up the database.

We implemented Zabbix ourselves. We are an experienced IT team, though.

Zabbix is free, open source software. 

I give Zabbix an eight out of ten.

Choose the templates to use carefully. Get to know the Zabbix templates and be prepared to modify/fix them because the templates available from the Internet are often buggy or incomplete.

We mainly use it for server monitoring, like checking how much storage is available. For network devices, we use PRTG.

The most valuable feature is that it provides network segregation for server monitoring. The server selection is easy to use in Zabbix in comparison to PRTG. We want to move the Zabbix servers into PRTG. We use PRTG for network devices and Zabbix for server segregation for the initial days.

Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue. But for PRTG devices, we can configure it on our own within half an hour. Besides, Zabbix is not easy to understand. The interface we need to check and what steps are to be taken to do so needs clarification. The new joiners need help learning to utilize it as they need to check the steps individually. Also, there were graphs in the earlier version, but the present version has blocks and no graphs.

I have been using this solution for four to five years.

There are some glitches with the stability. Currently, 30 servers are using it.

It is easy to scale. It will have a few comments, and after running that, it will install. I would give it a seven out of ten.

The initial setup of Zabbix is complex as it is installed on Linux machines. Besides, every package has to be installed individually. Even if one package is missing, it will not be installed. So everything needs to be checked. It's too much of a headache. The solution got deployed on the cloud.

My company makes payments to Zabbix regularly, but I am not sure.

I will rate this solution a seven 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 use Zabbix for network and server hardware monitoring.

Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product.

The GUI could be more intuitive. Also, we'd like streaming telemetry. Zabbix might have this feature, but I haven't seen it yet. It took us a long time to get started because the documentation isn't very descriptive. We had to go through various sources like YouTube and forums to get this solution working. 

I have been using Zabbix for about six months.

I rate Zabbix seven out of 10 for stability. It does the job, but I don't think we've truly tested it so far. 

I rate Zabbix five out of 10 for scalability. The solution has room for improvement in this area. My team is facing some issues with API integration. We were unable to find NetCom features. We wanted to use a different data modeling solution, like GRPC and GNMI. 

We get support from the community. It has helped us a lot. I'd rate Zabbix community support eight out of 10. 

Positive

I rate Zabbix four out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Zabbix is complicated,  and the documentation isn't clear. Including the research, it took us two or three workdays to get this up and running.

We have not weighed other options like SolarWinds or ManageEngine. This is the first one we have tried. It is somewhat early for me to say what Zabbix's advantages are relative to others.

I rate Zabbix seven out of 10. 

We delivered a project for telemetry but not just for IT. We are running a project monitoring different parameters for radio communication sites, so we collect information about alarms and analog values, not specifically IT projects. We need an application that  collects SNMP traps and show on the screen and take an historical report or graph. We contract with Zabbix for companies that have Zabbix for telemetry. We have integrated the system to our communications systems. This system is used in mission critical applications for radio communications, police, firemen's, health, etcetera.

It gave us one powerful tool to develop monitoring systems tailored to customer needs and maintenance staff.

We have found that Zabbix is more easy to use than other applications.

There are not too much documentation or manuals. We found the tutorials very easy to understand but do not go deep enough in the use of Zabbix. We need more manuals, proper use, documentation, etc. We would like to see some applications or plugins as bricks that we can use to construct applications to use with Zabbix. For example, we are starting using Zabbix with Grafana for presentations and apparently they match very easily but you need to put in a lot of work to get the final results. If you have some applications that you can add one to one, you can construct the project more quickly.

One year and a half

It is good after you tune each module application and sensor data collection.

Great for our applications. We use with Graffana GUI application that supports gauges, bars, time-related graphs, and maps.

The support is good. When we have something difficult to implement, we explain what the problems are and we get an answer quickly.

Positive

Many of our clients have an IT department and most of them work with WhatsUp Gold but some of them are starting to use Zabbix and when we started this project for telemetry it was not specifically for IT. We found many examples using Zabbix. Apparently, Zabbix is more user-friendly for non-IT people.

Both the vendor and the in-house team worked on the implementation. We bought it through a vendor and he trained our in-house engineers. Then we developed the system, supported by the vendor who also provided us with most of the sensors and data collection devices.

The local vendor's expertise and presence are the most valuable advantages we had. They were quick to answer any problem. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

The tart costs are very low, but you must consider the costs of having trained and enthusiastic people to develop and tune any application and the time to invest. This also has a positive side: you can win experience to solve new challenges instead of buying standard solutions focused on one market.

I would rate Zabbix at eight on a scale of ten.

We have some clients that have WhatsUp Gold but a few say they are oriented specifically for IT data centers, but that's not the orientation of our project. Some clients ask for WhatsUp Gold but most of the applications are not near to our needs. Some people are using Zabbix and recommend Zabbix. 

If you have IT monitoring needs, ask your IT System expert and probably he/she will opt for Whats Up Gold, but if you need Monitoring Services besides IT and many assorted technologies, you can look at Zabbix 

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. 

In my company, I have a lot of web services on the internet and use it for monitoring. For example, for concurrent sessions, I can count the HTTP requests, or I can use it to monitor the CPU and RAM in my devices, web application devices. 

It works well for my business. It meets my organizational needs. It's pretty easy to use.

It's very stable. It's got good reliability.

The pricing is okay.

For us, the support has been fine.

We have found the initial installation not that difficult.

The product could be more secure and more stable.

I've been using the solution for about four years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. That said, it could always be more stable. 

We have more than 200 people on the product and it seems to work well for us. We've never had an issue with scaling. It's good for u and fits our needs.

We haven't had an issue with technical support. We fill out a form when we run into issues. They are largely quite helpful. 

I also am familiar with Datadog.

I'm not sure if we used anything before Zabbix.

In terms of initial setup, it's petty straightforward. At the Linux stage, you can introduce the Linux commands. In the environment in Linux, you can install Zabbix pretty easily.

The deployment doesn't take too long. It might take only two weeks.

We do have a team that can manage the deployment and maintenance of Zabbix as needed. Usually, we have one or two managers that are able to handle anything that comes up. The rest of the team is a bit more technical. 

We have about 100 active licenses, however, I don't have many other details beyond that in terms of licensing and costs. My understanding is that the pricing is okay.

The product is a standalone in my data center, my local data center.

I would recommend the solution to others. It's been good to us so far and we do have experts in our country.

I'd rate the product at a nine out of ten. We've been pretty happy with it in general.

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.