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.

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 use Zabbix for monitoring server network equipment. The solution is deployed on-premises.

We have 10 technical engineers using the solution.

Zabbix allows us to monitor a lot of hardware equipment without any additional cost.

Most of the out-of-the-box features are valuable.

It would be helpful if they translated the documentation to Cyrillic languages.

We have been using this solution for five months.

From time to time, there are agents failing, but it's not often. I think it's stable.

The solution is being used every day because it's a monitoring system.

For our company, it is not scalable.

Support is given through tickets, but I'm not directly in contact with Zabbix support.

I have previously used SolarWinds.

Setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two or three months.

Implementation was completed by our engineers.

We pay the subscription for support by year.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

I can recommend Zabbix as a monitoring system.

We use Ubuntu for the distribution of our products and our web application firewall. Previously, I have also used a desktop version of Ubuntu on my laptop. We use this operating system for our Zabbix server as well, for monitoring, testing, and so on. 

We mostly use a server version, so it's only a command console. There's no graphical interface. 

This solution is deployed both on-premise and on cloud. 

Like other common Linux distributions, some of the most valuable features of this solution are the ease of use and deployment. It's simple and has a lot of packages and a lot of software. 

As far as improvements, sometimes I get a bit frustrated when I move from a previous version to a new one because some configuration has changed—I need to investigate the documentation to deal with some configuration. But it doesn't take much time, so it's okay. 

I don't have any requests for additional features. 

I have been using Ubuntu Linux for a little over 10 years. 

Ubuntu is stable. 

This solution is scalable, but the scalability is more appropriate for hardware, not for the operating system. 

In my company, there are only a few users dealing with the desktop version of the Ubuntu operating system. As far as production environments and testing servers, there are maybe a few dozen users. 

We have never contacted technical support. We've never had any problems which demanded support from the Ubuntu teams. 

Before using Ubuntu Linux, I used CentOS, Debian, and Kali Linux. 

The installation is really easy. The timeframe depends on the hardware speed, so it's rather fast. I handled the installation by myself. 

We don't actually have a technical team specific to Ubuntu—they're all IT guys, so we all have good skills for doing things ourselves. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

I'm surprised that Ubuntu Linux has a paid license, even some supporting stuff included. We don't use the paid version, we only use the common edition. 

I rate Ubuntu Linux a 10 out of 10. It's really great. I recommend Ubuntu Linux to others who are looking into implementing this OS. 

My primary use case is switch and database monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the protocol to manage anything.

An area for improvement would be the ease of doing aggregation from the value or different devices.

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

Zabbix is stable.

This product is scalable.

The initial setup was easy, and deployment took two to three months.

This solution is very good for data reporting. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of virtual machines.

Zabbix isn't a great tool for cloud-specific monitoring - its connection to public clouds needs to be improved. Other areas for improvement would be the lack of dashboards and integrations.

I used Zabbix for around three weeks on a test basis.

I really do not like this solution, almost all of its features are awful. I would rate it nine out of ten for on-premises environments but five out of ten for cloud platforms or BAS.

Before the deployment of Zabbix, we experienced some delays on our internet connection, we decided to deploy it and we registered all our network devices, such as switches. We turned on the firewalls in Zabbix. We linked Zabbix to Grafana to receive a more accurate graph.

From the use of Zabbix, we are now able to see an overview of our bandwidth consumption, a direct view of what links are being used on our backbone switches, and if there is any unusual peak of traffic on our network devices. Before using Zabbix and Grafana, we didn't have any view of the results of our network. We used to connect individually to every single device and collect the data to analyze but now, we have the opportunity to see graphs and charts of all of the network metrics.

I have found that the reporting feature in Zabbix is most valuable. Additionally, the solution has given us bandwidth options, we are able to see where problems are. For example, we noticed a problem that occurred because of a bad interface going in the wireless VLAN.

The user web interface is a little bit too basic, we need to link Zabbix to Grafana to have more options, such as graphs and charts. The interface needs to be improved. Additionally, there could be better integration with Grafana API.

I have been using Zabbix for a couple of months.

Zabbix is very stable. The resource consumptions are okay.

I cannot give too much information about the scalability features because our test environment is not very large. We have a small environment of only some firewalls and switches. We have some servers also, but we did not register them on Zabbix.

We have two users that are using this solution, the CTO and the principal network engineer.

We do not have plans to increase the solution right now but in two years we will.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I only needed to download the application and then deploy it in the VMware Workstation, that was it. Once the virtual appliance is connected to the network, it will automatically receive access via DHCP. Lastly, we use the interface to configure specific ports, the initial deployment is quite simple. 

The time it takes for the deployment takes only a few minutes.

We only require one network engineer for the maintenance of the solution.

We have received a return on investment because the solution is free and any gains we make are profit.

Zabbix and Grafana are both open source products, we only needed to go to their website and download the application and we began to use them. The solutions are free.

Zabbix is a good and very cost-effective product. It does its job very well. We downloaded it for performance monitoring and it's very effective.

I rate Zabbix an eight out of ten.

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.