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Engineering manager at BGH Tech Partner
Real User
Very user friendly, but needs more documentation to help understand how to use the product
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

Buyer's Guide
Zabbix
December 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

One year and a half

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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. 

What other advice do I have?

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 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1289460 - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Expert at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Easy to use with good support and a fairly simple setup
Pros and Cons
  • "It meets my organizational needs. It's pretty easy to use."
  • "The product could be more secure and more stable."

What is our primary use case?

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. 

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

The product could be more secure and more stable.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I also am familiar with Datadog.

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

How was the initial setup?

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. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Zabbix
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about Zabbix. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PeerSpot user
IT Assistant at Hotel 2 Fevrier
Real User
Open-source, reliable monitoring that helped solve my connection problems
Pros and Cons
  • "During my testing, the features that I like the most are that it can be integrated with my system, and it provides me with reports of all of my servers."
  • "I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability."

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case is to resolve connection issues for my YouTube access.

What is most valuable?

I am still exploring all of the features that this solution offers. At this time, I have only downloaded the system log and scripts. 

During my testing, the features that I like the most are that it can be integrated with my system, and it provides me with reports of all of my servers. This allows me to know what is going on with my servers.

Also, I can create a script to download all of my configurations.

What needs improvement?

I don't know if I can remotely restart my servers or to know how a guest is doing on the server. I would like to remotely connect to the computer, and Zabbix doesn't have this capability. 

I have to use another software such as Emperor to log into the computer to see what is going on with the servers.

I would like to see a RAS integrated with Zabbix for monitoring, also to be able to check the server and to have an automatic display to do what we need to do.

For how long have I used the solution?

We are in the testing phases of Zabbix. I have been testing it for three months.

We are currently deploying it on my VMware to test the product and see how it works. Once I have all of the skills and requirements, I can process it into a real deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zabbix is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I am currently the only user in my organization.

I plan to use Zabbix in the future, as it has helped me resolve my connection issue.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have not contacted technical support. When I have an issue, I research their YouTube channel and watch their videos. 

You have to be patient. It helped to resolve the issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously, I was using the PRTG Network Monitor. It's an expensive solution. 

I chose Zabbix because it's a free edition, and I don't require a lot of monitoring. Also, I was limited.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was fine, it was simple.

For a proper installation, it can take up to two weeks.

What about the implementation team?

I completed the installation myself.

I installed the server, and then the client on the Windows machine to make the link.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have not tested any other solutions. I looked at most of the other products, but we have to pay for them. 

To resolve a fixed problem, I would have asked the management to purchase the product, which would take time. Instead, I read the review and installed Zabbix directly to resolve my connection issue.

What other advice do I have?

I am also using this solution to help me with writing my master examination. I need to write something about this solution.

I would recommend this product to anyone who is interested in using it.

I would rate Zabbix an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer290277 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a aerospace/defense firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Reasonable network monitoring which works okay if you don't mind the glitches
Pros and Cons
  • "Simple network monitoring that is easy to install and manage."
  • "The product delivers false positives during reporting because of flapping. Other reasonably priced alternatives may have better performance."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use for the solution was to monitor the network and servers.

How has it helped my organization?

We used this solution for monitoring our applications and our internal web applications, which we couldn't do with Icinga (the previous software we used). That product was very good but the application monitoring of it wasn't good at all. Now I hear that application monitoring is very good in Icinga EN, so we might try it again.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable thing about the Zabbix product is that it was easy to install and manage.

What needs improvement?

There are a lot of things that can use improvement which is why we are seeking a new solution. Network monitoring is a problem. It gives too many false positives. For example, it notifies us that a server is down while I'm using that server — the server it claims is down — to do the search. A moment after the search is complete, everything is OK again. It's called flapping. It has some flapping control, but it's not as good as other products. I used to use Icinga and it is a better product in that respect.

For how long have I used the solution?

We had been using this product for about four years or more.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I know it doesn't just go dead on me, so the stability is okay I guess. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I don't really know how the product scales as I haven't tried to scale it up or I haven't had the need. Considering that we will be moving away from the product, I don't need to bother with that right now.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their online help is okay, but not as amazingly good as Icinga, for example. Icinga has the largest user base as far as I can tell and I use IRC for help a lot and there's a lot of people in it. There are few helping with Zabbix. The forums are pretty up-to-date.

As far as tech support itself, I have emailed them about the flapping issue, but the main issue that bothers me is the flapping and infrastructure monitoring which is not very good. The support team suggested a few tricks which would help but not as much as I want. The support team is responsive, but nothing was resolved.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We are actually looking for another solution that meets our needs better. That is not because Zabbix is necessarily a bad solution. Our needs changed and there are better solutions available.

I previously used ManageEngine OpManager in another organization, so I guess the reason as to why I switched was that I changed jobs. That product was excellent, but it is also out of the reach of my current budget.

How was the initial setup?

Installation was not hard and it was very straightforward. The initial deployment without any complex setup took a few hours. Then the setup took an additional three days to a week. In total about a week to be completely deployed with all the servers monitored and everything working.

I did the deployment alone. I set it up and everything, and left it to other people to monitor as per their responsibility. I have 10 admins monitoring it. I've stopped monitoring it at this point, or in the half past year or so, as I am looking for a better solution.

The admins use it daily. Even now, I'm getting all the emails and I'm a little bit bothered from the continued flapping. Every admin is responsible for a different aspect of the monitoring so they get their dedicated reports. For example, one admin is responsible for the ELP servers, so he's getting only the email for the ELP related stuff.

What about the implementation team?

We did not implement through a vendor. I did the implementation myself. It's very easy, you don't need anyone just to install it. For more complicated stuff that I was not sure of, I asked around on forums. I did the entire implementation myself and it's very easy.

What was our ROI?

Any product that is saving you from a network meltdown is really worth more than you pay for it. This product did its job and some are still using it in the organization while we search for a better solution.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this product a 7 out of 10. This is because it needs better flapping control and better infrastructure monitoring. Other products provide this already. I don't think I have much to say that isn't answered elsewhere. The product's benefit is that it is easy to get up and running. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Damien Finette - PeerSpot reviewer
Damien FinetteVP Sales APAC, EMEA at Argent Software
User

Hi Dror

Please feel free to contact me should I be of assistance.

Regards
Damien
DamienF@argsoft.com
Www.argent.com

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it_user3579 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Nagios vs Zabbix

Everyone is familiar with the product Nagios, which is often considered the de-facto standard for monitoring. The other tools in that general category are OpenNMS, Zenoss, Groundworks, HyperIQ and others. I am only talking here about tools that would qualify in the NMS category: something that really tracks different systems and devices across the entire infrastructure.

A couple of years ago, I was so tired of Nagios that I was ready to try something new. A couple of tools didn’t make the list, simply because of the “fremium” model. The basics are there, but anything more typically carries a hefty price tag.

I decided to try Zabbix and I have pretty much been a fan ever since. One caveat here, is that I am talking about version 1.8.x. Version 2.0 just came out and offers a few notable improvements, which I haven’t tried out yet. A couple of things that look very promising are: Direct JXM support, multi-homed hosts, and mounted filesystem discovery. Full list of changes is here

As an overview, Zabbix offers the following benefits:

Relatively quick & simple install on a variety of platforms Agent-based, but available agentless options. A fairly vibrant community A large amount of templates covering most popular software Integrated graphs Escalation management

More specifically:

Graphs

There are a lot of graphic front ends for Nagios. In general, they are bolt-ons of varying quality. On the other hand, graphs are probably one of the stronger features of Zabbix. Typically, templates will have a few graphs predefined, but more can be added fairly easily. Any item that’s being collected can also be graphed on-demand. The one small drawback is the inability to save pics on the fly, which is sometimes useful for distribution. A workaround for that is described in this thread.

Graphing performance is decent if not spectacular. That will largely depend of data volume, your hardware and range of time. What I found especially valuable is something zabbix refers to as “screens“. Generally, the entire point of graphing or visualizing something is to be able to easily identify trends and correlations. “Screens” allow you to group disparate items together. For example, if you wanted to see the correlation between your requests per second, queries per second, response time, network traffic and read/write percentage, it’s fairly trivial to put it together. Besides that, I’ve tended to use screens almost as targeted dashboards. Something like putting all the MySQL relevant information on the same screen (disk IO, queries per second, replication lag, cpu/mem, cache hits, etc) can let you know the health of your MySQL infrastructure almost immediately. Same can be done on the web side and other areas.

Performance Performance will vary quite a bit. I’ve ran Zabbix on a large instance at EC2, backed by a 4-volume EBS RAID set and was able to receive 600-800 values/second without much of a problem. However, with that setup, the screens (particularly the ones with with a lot of metrics) would load in 2-5 seconds and the lag was noticeable. One key tweak that is absolutely necessary is the polling frequency. Most of the default (and 3rd party) templates will have the polling frequency too high. You generally don’t need to poll for free space every 5 seconds and there are plenty of examples like this. The data retention period also needs to be adjusted in a lot of cases. Reducing those intervals to something more reasonable is going to give a significant performance boost. It will behave better because you’ll reduce the volume of incoming values, but it will also reduce the amount of data you store and query against in the database. You likely don’t need precise-to-the-second numbers for every metric you collect going back a year. Historical data is still available, though in a somewhat less detailed form, which is generally sufficient for trend information. If the data volume gets too large, the clean up process might start failing. I’ve noticed that around 150GB of data it would start having trouble. At that point there aren’t very many good options and they tend to be quite hairy. It’s best to avoid getting into the situation in the fist place.

There are also a couple of options for distributed monitoring, if the performance requirements exceed the capability of a single node. There is a lot of documentation about it on their site, but it generally boils down to a choice between proxy or a node. I tend to prefer a proxy because of easier setup and maintenance. In a more specific example, I’d use proxies in an AWS environment which was spread across different regions. Another good use case in AWS is if you have a mix of a VPC and regular EC2 and you’d place your proxy in the VPC. This method can allow for significant scaling capabilities, though you would still need a very capable central master. The one significant benefit to a node approach is that they can be queried independently and support a hierarchical approach. However, in an environment with 1000s of devices that support different applications, nodes are likely a better approach.

Monitoring It’s a fairly standard feature set that is generally similar across other NMS systems. A couple of things worth noting:

Web Monitoring – it has a built in web transaction monitoring. It’s decent if not spectacular and doesn’t really compare against sophisticated transaction monitoring systems that are out there. It does support multiple steps and it’s based on curl, though it doesn’t expose all of curl’s functionality. That will present a problem if you need to do extensive cookie manipulation and/or variables. It’s also useless for heavily AJAXed pages and the ones that use flash. Still, it’s decent for basic monitoring and more then most other systems offer. IMPI support is worth noting, but I’ve personally never used it. Log Monitoring – this isn’t going to work well for high traffic web logs, but it does a pretty solid job at picking up exceptions and errors in various files. It does support a full regex engine for pattern matching. I’ve had it monitoring files that received ~500 lines per second and it had no issues with that. Templates – this is the core approach to monitoring in Zabbix. All your monitoring definitions are ideally grouped in templates. When a new server/instance shows up, you simply apply the template to it or add it to a group to which this template is assigned. There are a few templates that come out of the box of varying quality and there are a lot of user-generated templates for a variety of applications. A lot of them will have a script (PHP/Perl/Python) that polls the application and sends the data back. Typically you’ll have to make a few tweaks that are specific to your environment. Some of the ones that I found useful and better then others are: This is the “default” MySQL template for Zabbix and it’s based on a PHP script. The description says it wasn’t tested on 5.1, but I didn’t seem to notice any issues. There are range of values that have to be tuned in order to avoid false alerts. If you’re used to the Cacti templates for MySQL and the data those provide, this is a port to Zabbix. If I remember correctly, this template required a few tweaks to the PHP script, in order to get it working. This is another decent template for MySQL, but you don’t get InnoDB information out of the box. It is good for monitoring multiple MySQL instances on the same box though. The other templates would require modifications in their polling scripts. For Haproxy, I’ve used this template. It’s better than others, since it allows you to look and compare statistics of individual servers behind Haproxy. The downside is that it won’t automatically discover changes. That can be scripted, but it might get a little hairy. For Nginx, this is more than sufficient for most needs. Another one that is useful for Nginx, though the site is in Russian. Google translate does a pretty good job there. There are a few other templates on that site, but I’ve never tried them.

Misc

It does have an API for automation. I think it was improved in 2.0, but in 1.8 it was already solid. There is a decent CLI tool written in Ruby that will interface with the API, called zabcon There isn’t a great way to control alert floods. You can control trigger dependencies, but if something really goes haywire you might be manually clearing SQL tables after that. Alert escalations are a little wonky, but they work reasonably well. It is pretty trivial to port existing Nagios plugins or other scripts into Zabbix. JMX monitoring was done via zapcat. It wasn’t great, but for the lack of better options this was the only thing to work with. Version 2.0 does it natively and if they did it right, that’s probably one of the biggest improvements.

In summary, from what I’ve seen, Zabbix is easily one of the top NMS systems out there, though it’s probably somewhat less popular than others. If you’re fed up with Nagios or doing a brand new deployment, taking a serious look at Zabbix will be worth your while.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user4329 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user4329Senior Manager of Engineering with 501-1,000 employees
Top 20Real User

The old-school systems produced graphs every time data was gathered. This resulted in a fast user experience displaying graphs, but it caused the number of values per second to be limited by the number of graphs per second you can produce.

Zabbix dynamically creates the graphs on demand. This reduces the number of times it much produce a graph, pushing up the number of values per second you can capture. But as the reviewer noted above, screens and individual graphs can display slowly if they contain too many data points.

I agree with the reviewer that many or most of the default poll rates in the templates have excessive poll frequency. In fact, they are so high as to have an impact on the machine your are polling if you have very many values you are pulling. Sometimes I think that the people that create the templates only have one machine they are monitoring, and they set the poll frequency high just to have quicker graphs appear when setting up a new zabbix server. Nothing is more boring than spending a couple hours setting up a monitoring system, only to have a bunch of graphs with single dots on them because your polling cycle for disk space is every 15 minutes. But regardless of the reason for it, I think it is irresponsible to release templates with inappropriate polling cycles.

But back to the graphs, if you have too much data, an otherwise simple graph will take a long time to display. On a screen this gets worse because you are displaying multiple graphs. So to get the best screen display performance, reduce the polling frequency to the lowest value that still produces good graphs.

I have been knows to produce two objects for the same item, with different polling cycles. A long polling cycle for graphs that appear on screens and public viewable pages, and faster polling cycles for detailed data collection to be used in debugging.

I've used nearly all of the network monitoring systems in the 30+ years I have been monitoring networks. Zabbix is my favorite for most applications. I do use more advanced commercial systems such as NetMRI, as the commercial systems can do things like discover all of your systems, and self configure. Commercial systems like NetMRI also do deep inspection, such as VOIP quality analysis, that Zabbix simply isn't designed to do.

I can do anything with Zabbix, anything that I have time to configure. But to be fair, systems like NetMRI can be configured for very large environments in 5 or 10 minutes, out of the box. But when I want to do something special, that I create code for myself, I don't use systems like NetMRI, I use Zabbix. Zabbix is my favorite general purpose network monitoring system. And to be fair, Zabbix is a commercial system too, when you need it to be.

Tools like NetMRI have a lot more power to self-configure, but that power is not free... The NetMRI quote for the hospital I worked for was $300,000!! The commercial version of Zabbix was much lower. And with some careful work with discovery templates, you could still get some self-configuration out of Zabbix.

Solar Winds is another commercial tool in the same space as NetMRI. Solar Winds is nice, but the performance is impacted by the fact it runs on Windows, so it takes more hardware to monitor large enterprises, but it is comfortable for the Windows geeks. I'm not a Windows geek...;)

George

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Shibu Babuchandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Manager/ Service Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
ExpertModerator
Makes it much easier for us to provide the customizations that customers want
Pros and Cons
  • "The best thing about Zabbix is the integration and the APIs that are included are very fast"
  • "The integration capabilities and APIs are the best part."
  • "The only improvement I would suggest, revolves around its AI and ML capabilities."

What is our primary use case?

Our customers like Zabbix because it's an open-source tool, but integration with other tools is not that easy. The company that I work for employs talented people and a good integration team who can get the end-to-end implementation and integration done properly. 

Zabbix is basically network monitoring software. Often, we are working with various solutions that we are attempting to integrate with Zabbix, and at the same time, we're trying to integrate a couple of bots to take automation to the next level. 

How has it helped my organization?

We have been able to address all the monitoring challenges with Zabbix , which is in addressing all the concerns from the customers

What is most valuable?

Because Zabbix is an open-source tool, it makes it much easier for us to provide the customizations that customers want nowadays. The best thing about Zabbix is the integration and the speed of the included APIs, that's the beauty of this product. It's an enterprise-level tool that allows you to monitor it with a number of devices and hosts. The integration capabilities and APIs are the best part.

What needs improvement?

Currently, we're looking for more AI and ML related capabilities, which is missing from Zabbix at this point in time. There are tools out there with plenty of AI and ML capabilities and this is something that Zabbix needs to come out with. That would make this a great solution to sell. Essentially, they are trying to achieve automation by introducing external RP bots. If Zabbix could fix this issue, it would be a fabulous solution for us to sell and for companies to use.  

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this solution for three years.

How are customer service and support?

Currently, we have a support agreement with technical support, and we're happy with it. We have taken up a paid service on support models with them as a partner, but lately, our own developers have been solving any issues. So, for slightly over six months, we have not contacted Zabbit for support. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The setup was free and because we use multiple tools, it was very easy for us. We had some teething issues, but the community is very good and helped us with that. The Zabbix community is very reliable and is quick to supply you with information when needed. 
The online support that we received from the community was very good and the KD was good enough for us to get it deployed. We didn't experience many challenges because we already had some concrete knowledge surrounding it. 

Deployment depends on the setup; I believe we had it installed in two days. Our customization depended on what level we were taking it to. We did all of the integrations and customizations ourselves, as required, but I believe we finished the base implementation within two days.

We have about 10 engineers, three to four of whom are certified on Zabbix and they take care of all maintenance related issues.  

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to anyone interested in enterprise-level monitoring and integration. The only improvement I would suggest revolves around its AI and ML capabilities. Those are the only problems, at this point in time, that I see with this solution. If these issues are addressed and included in a future release, then this will be an end-to-end, fabulous product for monitoring and automation.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Zabbix a rating of nine, simply because the world is rapidly progressing toward an AI and ML environment. Whenever you check out a new product, from Moonsoft for example, most of the marketplace jargon revolves around AI. So, when we talk about AI, the customers are ready to just blindly buy the product without understanding if it is real AI and ML, truly capable of completing the task at hand. That's why we started using bots to automate steps; to show the customers that even Zabbix, as a solution, can be used for automation using bots. It's a tedious process, but it's a great method of comparison.  

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Shibu Babuchandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Shibu BabuchandranRegional Manager/ Service Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
ExpertModeratorReal User

Zabbix is Open Source and comes at no cost.
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  • Escalate problems according to flexible user-defined Service Levels.

  • Customize messages based on recipient's role.

  • Customize messages with runtime and inventory information


Contact Zabbix Certified Partner - ASPL INFO SERVICES for Implementation & Support at shibu.b@asplinfo.com

Regional Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Open source, with great technical support and good scalability
Pros and Cons
  • "The product is very stable."
  • "There's a small module of APM, however, it is not an enhanced version. People usually ask for a full-fledged APM solution."

What is our primary use case?

The solution is a network monitoring tool. If you have any type of IT infrastructure, it can help you monitor that IT infrastructure and get the logs collected. You can control and manage your IT, et cetera.

What is most valuable?

The product is very stable.

It is a scalable tool. 

The solution is open source also. There's no cost for the license.

Technical support is very good.

What needs improvement?

They need to improve the APM solution, the Application Management solution. There's a small module of APM, however, it is not an enhanced version. People usually ask for a full-fledged APM solution. 

The initial setup could be a bit simpler. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for five years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

If a company needs to expand the product, it can do so with Zabbix. It's scalable. 

We have 21 to 22 clients using this solution currently.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is very good. They are helpful and responsive and we are happy with their level of support. 

How was the initial setup?

I'd rate the solution's initial setup as a seven out of ten. 

The installation will take time according to the IT infrastructure involved. It depends on if there are multi-locations versus one location and whether it is on the cloud or whether it is on-premises. Even so, deployment will take at least two to three weeks at a minimum.

We have eight to ten people on our team that can handle deployment and maintenance. They are admins and engineers. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is completely open-source and free to use. 

What other advice do I have?

I'm a Zabbix partner.

The solution is excellent. I would rate it at a ten out of ten. 

I would recommend the solution to other users and other organizations. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Application Monitoring Technical Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
MSP
Good pricing and scales well but needs better dashboards
Pros and Cons
  • "The pricing of the product is reasonable."
  • "The stability could be better."

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
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Updated: December 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Zabbix Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.