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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.

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.
Co-Founder at Nobius IT
Reseller
Top 5
Fabulous flexibility - supporting a vast variety of data sources including IoT protocols. Very stable and well supported. Scalable to many thousands of values per second.
Pros and Cons
  • "The flexibility of this solution is amazing."
  • "Documentation terminology could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

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. 

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

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

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. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Nagios - too much development effort to maintain and configure.

What other advice do I have?

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. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

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: UK Based Certified Partner. Author is Zabbix Accredited Certified Professional