Zabbix Reviews

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

I've been using the solution for five years. 

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

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.

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

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. 

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

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. 

The solution is primarily used for monitoring servers, printers, and network switches.

It's very easy to use and manage.

The solution is stable.

You can scale the product well.

There is a free open-source version of the solution.

I don't like to use the solution for the most part.

I get too many false positives. I get a problem one minute and then it's okay the next. That happens a lot. I hate that.

The user interface could be better.

The performance needs improvement.

I've been using the solution for six years or so. I've used the solution for a while at this point.

I don't have any issues with the stability. The performance isn't great, however. That said, it doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't really any bugs. 

The scalability is good. A company can easily expand it.

We have about five users who monitor it constantly. I no longer manage it myself. 

I've never contacted technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I need to be able to monitor stuff and I can't monitor these things now, so I am using other products for it.

The installation happened a long time ago. I can't recall what the implementation was like in terms of if it was complete or straightforward. 

You only need one person to handle the maintenance. 

I'm using a free version. I do not pay any licensing fees.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'm not sure if I would recommend the solution. I really don't like it as it generates a lot of false information. That said, it is a good monitoring solution, for what it's worth.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We use this solution for network and application monitoring.

The solution is open-source, easy to manage, and user-friendly making it easy for anyone to use.

Zabbix is always improving by adding more features and they have monthly announcements explaining the upcoming new features and functionality.

The automation could be improved.

In an upcoming release, there should be automated reports which we are currently doing manually. For example, if we collect a report file every day and want to send it to a moderator for review. We are expecting this feature to come out soon but it would be valuable to have now.

I have been using this solution for approximately four years.

The solution is stable. They release major updates every two or three years with the minor changes being released every six months.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have evaluated other solutions. 

I rate Zabbix an eight out of ten.

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.