Zabbix Reviews

We are currently doing a POC. For now, it is our testing tool.

We use it mostly as a monitoring infrastructure for services and applications, and it also monitors the capacity.

As we are still in the test phase, we have not yet explored all of the features offered in this product.

It's a flexible solution.

My main intention is to support or use Zabbix to report patching for servers, or to somehow maintain the patching from Zabbix.

Outside of the normal standard monitoring, I would like to extend patching, importing patching, and supporting patching for Windows Servers.

I have been using Zabbix for one year.

We are using the newest version.

Zabbix is a stable solution.

We have not yet tested the scalability of this solution. We tested it on a small group of devices, so it is difficult to say at this time.

We intentions to install more features on the device. During the testing, we don't have all of the resources to manage all installations.

We have approximately 40 users in our organization who are using Zabbix.

We have contacted technical support from Zabbix, and have spoken with partners from Poland. 

I have more experience with the WhatsUp Gold Monitoring tool. I still have WhatsUp Gold but we are going to replace it.

We are testing other tools that are free.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy.

With the help of suppliers, it did not take much time to deploy. It was not complex.

As we were using it for testing, we were using suppliers.

We will need a team of experts for this solution as well as some external support.

There is no license but we need to pay for support.

Zabbix is an open-source solution.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

With my current experience, I would 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.

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.

I use the solution for network monitoring. When I was in engineering school I used this solution and I found it really good. I wanted to bring the functionality of this solution to my community to show the engineers in my enterprise. There is not a lot of understanding of network monitoring and I am hoping to bring to them my knowledge. 

The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white. If you are a new user it is very simple, you do not need to be highly technical to use it. You can rapidly learn how to use this solution.

When using this solution in enterprise monitoring, you are able to see that there are some issues with equipment that could be causing a problem. Sometimes you want to make a root command that you do not want to be executed automatically. What we have tried to do is open an SSH session directly from the solution's interface but it is not possible. I have heard from others that there are scripts that can manage this task easily but I have not figured it out. In the area of the solution where you write the command, it is not very user-friendly and could be improved. We want the ability to write commands and execute them manually.

Additionally, I would like the ability to be able to have network mapping for this solution. I use network mapping to monitor networks and there are not very many tools that are able to do it or if there is a tool, it is not easy.

The color scheme of the interface could improve by allowing more variations or user customization.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution is stable. 

We have approximately 10 people using the solution in my company.

In my community, we were previously using Nagios and Cacti.

The solution is free. However, many open-sourced tools start out free but eventually start charging, I hope this solution stays free. 

I rate Zabbix an eight out of ten.

We use Zabbix on-premises for monitoring our servers and calculating consumption of CPU, memory, and storage space. It's an important part of monitoring our environments and it shows us a lot of information about the health of our systems. And, in terms of performance, we also use it for actively getting rid of bottlenecks.

There are four IT staff members who use Zabbix regularly, including system administrators and the director of IT.

With Zabbix, we can be proactive in eliminating problems with over-consumption of resources, such as with memory, for example.

The most valuable features in Zabbix are those that help us overcome bottlenecks in CPU usage, as well as reduce memory delay. I know that we have only reached the tip of the iceberg of what Zabbix's features can do for us, and we have not used all of them yet.

I think the reporting part of Zabbix can be improved in terms of more user-friendly graphics to display the collected data. Many simple users who don't know how to use Zabbix properly might get confused by the reporting, although at the same time it is very versatile for my company.

I've been using Zabbix for three years.

There have been no issues with stability.

We don't have much need to scale Zabbix, virtually or otherwise, or increase its usage beyond current levels, but I think it is simple to do.

We were previously using Nagios, but with Nagios the reporting features are very poor. If you want to improve on the reporting with Nagios, you have to construct other features and software on top of it, whereas Zabbix is more to the point and straightforward.

Zabbix's reporting isn't very good, either, in my opinion, but it's better compared to Nagios.

The setup was easy.

Regarding the installation of Zabbix, we did it by ourselves and it was easy enough. Our branch's environment is pretty simple and we don't have many complex requirements.

We were searching for an open source solution and Zabbix fit the bill because it is free and open source under the GPL license. 

My advice is that the person who is responsible for implementing Zabbix in their environment should be familiar with Linux because then the process is more simple, efficient, and takes less time.

I would rate Zabbix an eight out of ten. 

We are using Zabbix as our network monitoring solution. We are now trying to understand how to use the service assurance functionality, as we would like to leverage Zabbix for this task.

The most valuable feature is service assurance.

The interface is pretty straightforward. As long as the agent is running on another instance and Zabbix is able to connect to the agent, we haven't seen any issues.

Zabbix claims that there is an auto-discovery process but my team member was facing difficulty and was told that it's not really automatic, and there are some manual steps. 

We have been working with Zabbix for the past month. We are conducting a proof of concept with it.

We are not yet using Zabbix very much. We have spawned the Zabbix server and only a couple of AWS instances are running, which it is monitoring. This is to make sure there are no billing problems in AWS. At the end of the day, we stop the Zabbix monitoring. The next day when we come in, we start it again.

At this point, with our limited usage, we have not seen any issues with stability. Perhaps, once it has been running full-time for a week or longer, we may hit those types of issues.

During our PoC, we only have two technical people working with it.

This is the first monitoring product that we have worked with. Prior to this, we were dealing with NMS and CMS products.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We did not face any issues and it was up and running within a day.

Our in-house technician completed the deployment.

This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge.

At this point, it is too early for me to recommend Zabbix one way or the other, as we have just scratched the surface of its capabilities.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I've designed and built a high-available solution with Zabbix version 5. I introduced and deployed Zabbix in my current company, and it ended up becoming a production service within the company.

I like being able to use proxy servers for different locations. The agents are pretty cool. They're easy to roll out. 

The standard out-of-the-box templates are also pretty easy to use. The integration with other learning products is also good. I have, in the past, used Slack, but we've integrated it with Microsoft Teams. We also use it for SMS with a service called Redcoat. It is very flexible.

It does what I need it to do, and my manager is very happy because it doesn't cost anything. We are nearing 4,000 hosts inside Zabbix, and we've got another 6,000 access points to add to it. We've thrown everything at it, and it has managed to keep going. I am very impressed with the tool, and I'd shake their hand very hard if I got to say the compliments to the Zabbix team. They keep improving it and doing refreshes, which is one good thing about it. There is also online information as well as books that you can purchase if you're willing to read enough. There is a lot to pick up, but it is a pretty complete solution.

The APM monitoring has room for improvement, although I hear that the new 5.2 version has some improvements in that area, and I'd like to give that a go. I would like to see a few more templates out there for different styles of monitoring. I use the Grafana interface for reporting. 

I would also like it to have an out-of-the-box ability to email reports. You can create reports, but to be able to email those reports would be really helpful. I've got users who are not interested in logging in and generating a report. They want it all pre-canned and sent to an email address. It would also be really handy if we could pin certain reports up onto platforms such as Teams or SharePoint.

A GUI for the proxy server would be cool to have for debugging purposes and for the support teams to have a look at, but I don't know whether that's really feasible to do. I get enough from the log files themselves.

I've been using this solution for probably over five years. I started using it from version 3. 

Zabbix is very stable. We ran into a few performance issues in the early proof of concept days. The database running on normal hard drives impacted the ability to process all items in a timely manner, and when I moved to SSDs, those issues went away.

For all implementations, the sizing calculator needs to be used to ensure the correct size of the database. Based on the number of hosts and items the performance of the database needs to be factored in.

We've managed to scale up recently from about 150,000 items. We're now on to about 380,000 items. We're not really seeing any major flaws or issues in that environment. It is pretty good.

Many years ago, when I worked for a different company, I had access to their support, and they were very good. They were very knowledgeable. I was working on versions 3 and 4. I also got training from them. They did a five-day training course for us. 

I am pushing my company at the moment to try and get an enterprise license so that we can get some on-site support and some guidance to make sure that we're deploying within recommendations and the way they would do it. At the moment, they're relying on me to get it up and running and make it work, but I'd love to have some support, and I know they're very good. It is an education company, and I am keen to get more people in front of it. There'll be more opportunities within the university itself from what we've already done, but that's a work in progress.

I've done many setups. They're all pretty easy to do. There are lots of different flavors of it. I've used Apache and Nginx. MySQL and PostgresSQL are the two databases I've tried out. I've done different versions. 

At the moment, my system runs on Postgres. We're looking to implement TimescaleDB on that, and we've got an Ingenex front-end that we use. It is a little bit more solid than the Apache version, and it is very flexible. You choose what you want and then you roll with it.

My manager is very happy because it doesn't cost anything.

I would definitely recommend it. It is very good for what I want it to do. I would recommend getting your Linux and databases teams involved very early on in the journey, and when you are deploying, make sure that you are targeting the more important applications in your portfolio. Don't just try and deploy it on everything straight off the bat. Try and pick some critical applications to look at and build the value in the product in the initial phase, and that usually gets people interested in the application and moving forward. That would be my advice to people. One of my drawbacks was that I waited a bit too long, and when I brought them on board, I had already built most of the environment myself. I should have got them involved a lot earlier and sooner. It is not really a bad thing, but you can't do everything yourself, so try and get people on board.

I would rate Zabbix a nine out of ten. I am pretty biased. I really enjoy using Zabbix, and I feel it does what I need it to do. It definitely ticked the boxes. In my current role and in three years, I've gone from demoing Zabbix, doing a proof of concept, and integrating it with a few things to the boss turning around and saying, "Right, make it production." I have to admit that everybody that has come into contact with it or I've presented it to has been very pleased with the results. It has been a very good fit. I can only compliment the tool. 

I am not giving it ten because it's not perfect. I don't think any monitoring tool is absolutely a hundred percent perfect. There is always room for improvement, but this has to be one of the better ones. I know what I'm doing, and I could do more if I had support from them, but what you can do with the tool is very good as compared to other tools that I've tried out in the past, such as Nagios. With Nagios, if you really want the full functionality, you have to pay for it. Here, they give you that functionality. You've just got to know how to use it. It is very clever, and it has definitely won me over as a tool. Thanks to deploying and using Zabbix, I have learned a lot of stuff around Zabbix as well. I have learned a lot about different tools such as Linux,  MySQL, and Postgres that are needed to run the service. It has been good. I have enjoyed it a lot.

We needed a tool to know what the space inside of the infrastructure is like. My work was to use Zabbix to get information about the IT infrastructure in the village or in the towns that are very far from the headquarters. I had to use Zabbix to provide information with maps that the IT was working and so that the headquarters can see in real-time what the healyh of the IT infrastructure we had deployed in the electrical network is.

After this experience, I tried Zabbix in african organization based in my country and it was used to monitor the IT infrastructures in three countries, cameroon, benin and ivory coast. For the moment, Zabbix is not yet very popular here but I really appreciate it and really want to make people know that it's very simple to use. 

In 2023 i tried Zabbix 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9. And news features like pdf report have improved my Admin Sys routine.

Zabbix has improved the daily monitoring tasks by making them easier and faster.

The feature that I find most valuable is the stateful map. In fact, the Zabbix map designing tools permit to make monitoring stateful maps with topologies similar to the reals IT network maps.

My company wanted to do an exercise command to access IT from Cameroon. They wanted to access an FSS to a second host with second equipment that was on another coast but it is not possible on Zabbix to do it. They want to directly access from the front-end of Zabbix to access a prompt in Zabbix to an access terminal. In the front-end, there is no way to do that. That would be an important improvement. 

II have been using this product for nine years.

It is very scalable because I tried version 5. I used 5 from 0 and I see that they have improved many things, but there is not yet this option to have an access terminal where you have many functionalities. 

The scalability works fine because the community is very active. When a new version comes out, we can see that they have tried to add.

The technical support is very quick. When I have a problem and I post it in the community, they answer me very quickly. For now, i don't need any technical support. 

Positive

In fact, even if I have looked at Nagios first, before Zabbix I did not really use it or any other monitoring solution.

The initial setup was very quick. The first time it was long because I didn't know it yet. I was only using Windows. The first time was very difficult because of the operating system. 

I implement Zabbix in-house with as outsourcing offficials webs tutorials

Zabbix exploitation has dispensed with financing frequent visits to the technical area through alerts, notifications, and stateful maps. Thus, the return on investment is more than 100%.

Zabbix is an effective cheaper network monitoring solution because it doesn't need any ongoing cost due to licensing.

Before choosing Zabbix, we evaluated Nagios but we were not comfortable with notifications messages syntax and configurations.

I would recommend Zabbix to people who want to monitor a simple network.

I have found that the literature on the website is not very easy for some people. They want to be in those to read more about Zabbix, how to install it, and what the normal problems are.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.