Zabbix Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

The documentation needs to be improved.

The deployment is complex and should be simpler to complete.

I have been using Zabbix for about a month.

Once the product is started, it is stable.

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

I did not contact technical support.

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

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

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

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

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

I completed the deployment myself.

I was using the free, Community Edition.

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

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

I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

In my primary experience with this solution, Zabbix was used to monitor the IT infrastructures of a SCADA system in electrical substations. It was about network supervision of routers and switches that are used to communicate with electricity installations through RTU (Remote Terminal Unit).

Zabbix has improved the quality of monitoring because of the user-friendliness of its Graphical User Interface, so is easy to use even for non-IT employees.

Customizable network maps and email alerts or the intuitive web interface had made Zabbix very useful. 

I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP.

They should open an SSH session from the web interface.

I have been using Zabbix for four years. I discovered this very efficient network monitoring tool in a course from my engineering training and stuck to it!

The only Zabbix support that I use is Zabbix Telegram and Discord Community.

Positive

Zabbix was my first love for network monitoring and I just adopted it. I did not previously try a different solution.

The initial setup is very easy, with a few command lines. For simple network monitoring, there is no need to install any special packets on the Linux server.

My first installation was Zabbix 3.2 on a CentOS 7 Linux Server. The very difficulty that I faced was the fear of the unknown!

i implemented this solution through a very small in-house team where no one was a Linux expert.

Zabbix is open source and free. There are no hidden costs for any features or licensing. So, I would advise hat other s use this product.

When I was looking for the best solution for our monitoring needs, before choosing Zabbix, i had evaluated other tools options like Nagios.

With regards to COVID-19, Zabbix's meetup and training were 100% online and were very helpful for keeping in touch with network engineers around the world, despite social restrictions.

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. 

Open Source: All the sources for all the products are Open Source, so you can use a complete product from the start. There are no "premium" features with additional cost.

It gives you visibility over your infrastructure, so you are able to know the health of your services and it's dependencies every moment (and even to react automatically to problems). For example, in one organization I worked for, before Zabbix the problems were normally reported by the clients using the call center, so the Operations team was always working against the clock and with high levels of stress; after a successful implementation of Zabbix, putting the right monitors in place and a period of stabilization, the Operations team had the information to prevent the problems before the clients were affected. This resulted in a Operations team with lower levels of stress, more time to work on important projects and client satisfaction by lowering the number of problems visible by the client.

The low discovery functionality is still very young so this feature has a lot of room for improvement. The graphics generated by the system can be improved and also the web interface. At this point in time it's possible to archive a good level of security by using external tools, but it would be nice if this level of security could be archived out of the box.

I've been using the solution since version 1.4 which was around 2008, so I've been using the product for six years now.

Having the right knowledge, the installation and implementation of Zabbix it's very simple, even the principal Linux distributions already have a Zabbix version in their repositories. A successful implementations requires the knowledge of what it's necessary to monitor and the way to do it, but this is true for all monitoring products.

No, the software is very stable as well as the the components it depends on (in my case Linux, Apache, MySQL).

No, Zabbix is very scalable and well programmed, also gives you elements to identify when the performance could be a problem and can be configured in a very granulated way. Also, the principal components can be separated and gives you options to distribute the monitoring (archiving horizontal scaling).

I don't have first hand experience with the Zabbix SIA support, but the support the community provides it's great.

Based on the information I can see in the Zabbix forums and social networks I would say Zabbix SIA have engineers with an excellent technical level.

Yes, the principal reasons to switch to Zabbix were: Flexibility (Zabbix allowed the monitoring of something the other product does not), cost (no license costs, it was possible to monitor something with no extra costs, the hardware necessary for Zabbix was much lower) and in the tests Zabbix outperformed the other products evaluated.

The first time I installed the product (back in 2008) my initial impression was the software was complex to install, basically because at that time the repositories of my Linux distribution had an old version of the software and I wanted the most recent so I installed the software by compiling the sources; but once you understand, document and become familiar with the process it's pretty easy. Also, at the beginning understand the philosophy behind Zabbix was a little complicated but equally once you have the knowledge it all become easy and natural. Another aspect you can consider complex in Zabbix it's the lack of detail in some templates, so if you only use the out of the box templates (without changes) you ended up with a basic monitoring, most of the time you will need to extend the template to adjust it to your specific needs and obviously this will require knowledge of several aspects (this can be seen as an advantage or a disadvantage).

I've been responsible for about 4 Zabbix implementations and always was in-house job.

In this case, again, I don't have numbers. In the last implementation, the original cost was only the cost of the hardware plus the salary of the sysadmin responsible of the system, the day to day cost it's only the salary of the sysadmin. No fees for licenses and no fees for support at this time.

Yes. Nagios: This product it's the de-facto for open source network monitoring. System Center Operations Manager: The monitoring solution of Microsoft.

My advice is that its good to have a clear understanding of the goals you are looking to fulfill with the monitoring system, the objectives must be clear, also the environment in which the system will be implemented and the capacities (hardware, people, time, etc). There are a lot of aspects to take into consideration when choosing and implementing a monitoring system so invest as much time as possible in planning carefully. Zabbix is a great product, with great flexibility and I'm sure can be adequate to most of the situations, but maybe it's not the best choice in some scenarios, so plan carefully before choosing and implementing any product. For example, I would not suggest an in-house Zabbix implementation to a company without technical staff.

We are using Zabbix in our project for demo purposes. One of our clients is also using Zabbix. They have a data center, and they use it for internal monitoring. They are on a cloud system.

It is a great product. The SNMP protocol tracking feature is good. I really like how it tracks SNMP. The alerts are also great. 

Its UI needs to be improved a little bit more so that an end-user is also able to handle it. I can handle it, but others should also be able to handle it in a better way.

It becomes complex when we are growing and need to add proxies. We need more scalability features and documentation for different use cases. A lot of articles are available, but they need to be in proper documentation. For example, when you have thousands of servers that have to be monitored in different regions of the world, there should be some kind of documentation to describe how you can create proxies and add them. Sometimes, when you are using the database, it can get overloaded. When the network is growing, the number of transactions becomes very high, and the database gets overloaded. There should be information about how to reduce the load on the MySQL database, which is what Zabbix is using. 

The market is growing a lot, and it should be enhanced for a lot more things. We are currently bringing enhancements at our end for different use cases. For example, when dockerization is going on, how can we check the logs inside the Dockers. We should also be able to monitor and check the number of logins and add features such as SSO login and two-factor authentication as a protocol. These are the security features and concerns that we have to deal with. Currently, we are developing modules to add features to Zabbix, but they should also work on these features.

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

It is stable up to a level. 

When you are growing and need to add proxies and other things, it becomes complex. To deal with this kind of complexity, more scalability features and documentation for different use cases are required.

I did not connect with Zabbix support, but the client's team connected with them. I worked with the client initially, and after that, I gave them access and everything else. They directly sync up with Zabbix's support team.

The initial setup is great. However, later on, when you are scaling it, it becomes complex.

Its licensing is fair. It seems to be much cheaper than others.

Zabbix is a good product. It just requires a better development model, better UI, and better scalability. It also needs more features.

I would rate Zabbix a seven out of ten.

• Stability
• Flexibility
• Expandability

My favorite features are auto-discovery and LLD (low-level discovery) with Zabbix (and with some programming experience), you can monitor absolutely everything.

Also, it is worth mentioning the good quality of documentation and great community support.

Before we implemented Zabbix, we were blind.

I'd like it if they'd have implemented some sort of SNMP auto-discovery.

Almost seven years (from version 1.8.2).

There were some issues, then I made an upgrade from version 1.8 to 2.4.
I had to migrate existing MySQL DB (that is sitting under the hood) from one engine to another.

Yes. But again, it was an upgrade issue.

From the very beginning, I used distributed monitoring that was based on the Zabbix nodes conception, but they got rid of the nodes since version 3.0.0.

So, I had to change Zabbix Nodes with Zabbix Proxies. Finally, I have found out that the Proxies have better performance, stable matching, and are easier to configure than the Nodes.

I know they have one but I never had a chance to use it.

Before Zabbix, It was another Open Source solution: Nagios. Actually, I set them both up simultaneously.

So, I had a chance to compare them side-by-side. Finally, I chose Zabbix.

Setup is the very first step. This step you have to perform just once. The process is easy and straightforward, but the product itself is not easy to use.

I would suggest reading documentation before the installation. It has a steep learning curve.

The monitoring of IT infrastructure is not a piece of cake. Don't think you can install it with a couple of clicks and be done.

To implement have a good implementation, you have to read the documentation thoroughly.

Like any other Open Source product, you can spend some money on support, but the product itself is free of charge.

No, I did not evaluate other options before choosing this product.