Chief Security Officer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
Create custom metrics, flexibility to view and log the data history, and extremely stable
Pros and Cons
  • "The level of discovery-based configuration that lets us auto-configure the monitoring for various systems is a valuable feature."
  • "Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

The creation of custom metrics could be simplified.

Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting.

Buyer's Guide
Zabbix
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Zabbix. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Zabbix for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Zabbix is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

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

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

Zabbix is free, open source software. 

What other advice do I have?

I give Zabbix an eight out of ten.

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

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
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
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Zabbix. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Deputy Manager - Infrastructure at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Good for monitoring but complicated to configure and it needs to be more customizable
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is monitoring."
  • "Having a more customizable interface and dashboard would be an improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use Zabbix for monitoring our infrastructure.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is monitoring.

What needs improvement?

Having a more customizable interface and dashboard would be an improvement.

The interface could be more user-friendly because it is can be really complicated if an end-user has to configure it. The administrator usually has to take care of that.

I would like to see more SNMP and storage support.

Application monitoring should be included in the future. I would like to see voice telephony monitoring and database monitoring.

The reporting functionality is limited.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Zabbix for the past four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have had no problem with scalability. The only people who use it are the IT staff, which is between 10 and 12 people.

How are customer service and technical support?

As we are using the free version, we do not have a support contract.

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

We are using the free, open-source version.

What other advice do I have?

This is not a product that I recommend. Instead, I recommend using SolarWindows or ManageEngine for monitoring because there are more features on Zabbix with limited usability. Reports are also limited. Basically, you get more features in SolarWinds or ManageEngine.

I would rate this solution a five 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
PeerSpot user
Senior Manager of Engineering with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Extremely powerful and flexible but the auto-discovery function has room for improvement
On a scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), how would you rate this product overall compared to similar products?
- In my experience there are two classes of network management systems, Open-source systems that are generally free, and commercial systems complete with support as well as some advanced self configuring features. Zabbix actually fits into both classes, but in my view it has more in common with the open source systems.
- Compared to SIMILAR products, I would give it a 5. This means as compared to similar open-source tools that do not have a strong network auto-discovery feature.
- By network auto-discovery, I mean features found in tools like SolarWinds, NetMRI and other commercial products that have part of the configuration work done in advance. For example, when I plug in NetMRI and give it a list of login/password combinations and an IP range, it is able to self-configure, finding most of my network gear automatically. Network discovery is a useful feature that can reduce the amount of time it takes to integrate a system.
- Zabbix does have a discovery feature, but it is configured by the user. Zabbix is extremely powerful, and I got the network discovery tool working in just a couple hours after my first installation. The advantage is that it can be used to detect and configure non-standard devices.
- The self-configuring systems like SolarWinds and NetMRI seem like they have an advantage, however there is a cost associated with that advanced function. The largest one being that they only support a small set of big-names, like Cisco. Not everything on a network is a Cisco, so that advantage quickly becomes less important.

For how long have you used this product?
- Over 6 years.

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- It is the flexibility of the system that I enjoy the most. I can make it do things that are unique to me, such as do deep analysis of a custom device that I built. Or non-standard hardware that require unique test methods. Of course it also does the standard stuff very well. I have Zabbix monitoring Servers, network components, Air conditioners, etc. I have it alerting field installers for an ISP, to let them know that they have made an error in configuring an end-user router.
- It can do anything I can imagine doing. I even keep an eye on my BBQ smoker at home with Zabbix.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- The best examples are in an ISP and in a large network of Hospitals.
- In an ISP, it allows the network operators to track the performance for each customer, and know about outages before the customers do. It allows the operators to track network quality so that problem trends are detected before customers are impacted. It also watches for new devices being connected to the network, and tracks environmental conditions in field. If we discover a new condition to watch for, it takes only seconds to add new tests to thousands of devices.
- In a hospital network where there are many mission critical systems, I can use it to track and report on SLA's as well as monitor unique medical devices that you are not going to find supported by a system like SolarWinds. It allows me to create dash-boards for executives, giving each management user a front page view that is specific to their needs. So each user sees what they need, and nothing that they don't need. With the discovery engine, I can take common network components, and create a template for the desired configuration. Then I can have the system scan the entire network and automatically identify and add each different type of equipment to the system.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- The auto-discovery function could be improved to include more hands-off automation. The current system is great for experts, but it could be improved so that a novice could use it as well.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- In the early versions, there were some scaling issues, but there have been several large improvements in that area, and in general the system is much more scalable than most systems, such as SolarWinds.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- I have used many different systems over the years. As time passes, each system was replaced by a different competing system. Each new system was better than the ones before it, with improvements in ease of use, scalability, depth of function, and flexibility all seeing improvement as I progressed from one system to another.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- HP Openview, Ipswitch whats up, Big Brother, Nagios (was Net Saint), MRTG, RRD, Cacti, Zenoss, GLPI, Solar Winds, NetMRI, LiveAction... and I'm sure there have been others that I left out, as well as many home-grown systems.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- I have never used the official technical support channel for Zabbix, however I have engaged the community by using the support forums. And in the forums I was able to get help directly from one of the Zabbix developers when I found specific issues I needed help with.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- There was a steep learning curve. I have found nearly all systems to have steep curves. The easiest systems were the expensive commercial systems, although even those had some difficulties when you wanted to do something non-standard. Zabbix was not the worst system, and was far from the easiest. However the need to learn something complex is rewarded by the capabilities gained. I'm an expert as implementing monitoring systems, but someone with fewer years of experience will probably find it even more challenging, and may feel the need for training, which is available.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- I am an army of one!

What is your ROI on this product?
- Because I focused on an unsupported free version, my main investment is time. Because of my experience level, and the automation featured I used on day one, I found an immediate ROI half-way through the first day of use. I was able to get done in 4 hours on Zabbix what was going to take many months on the system I had been using before (a combination of Nagios and Cacti).

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- The original set-up cost was an open-source OS deployed in a virtual environment... so about 1/4th the price of one server, and about half a day of labor.

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- This is a system designed for professionals, and is most advantageous when used by someone with some training or a lot of experience. A novice can learn to use the system, but be prepared to work hard to learn a fairly complex system.
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
Real User

I purchased a copy of that book myself. I can't say that I read very much of it, but I keep it around for others, and I like the idea of supporting the author of my favorite management system.

As for the SNMP traps, when I refer to the Zabbix documentation, I incorrectly lump the official and community documentation together. I'm a googler, so they tend to transparently intermingle under my fingertips. But yes, the SNMP traps are documented on the community wiki with four different recipes,

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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
Real 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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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.
PeerSpot user
IT Administrator at a aerospace/defense firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Easy to use and manage but delivers too many false positives
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution is stable."
  • "The user interface could be better."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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. 

How are customer service and technical support?

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

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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. 

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

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

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
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: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Zabbix Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.