Zabbix Reviews

Our primary use for the solution was to monitor the network and servers.

We used this solution for monitoring our applications and our internal web applications, which we couldn't do with Icinga (the previous software we used). That product was very good but the application monitoring of it wasn't good at all. Now I hear that application monitoring is very good in Icinga EN, so we might try it again.

The most valuable thing about the Zabbix product is that it was easy to install and manage.

There are a lot of things that can use improvement which is why we are seeking a new solution. Network monitoring is a problem. It gives too many false positives. For example, it notifies us that a server is down while I'm using that server — the server it claims is down — to do the search. A moment after the search is complete, everything is OK again. It's called flapping. It has some flapping control, but it's not as good as other products. I used to use Icinga and it is a better product in that respect.

We had been using this product for about four years or more.

I know it doesn't just go dead on me, so the stability is okay I guess. 

I don't really know how the product scales as I haven't tried to scale it up or I haven't had the need. Considering that we will be moving away from the product, I don't need to bother with that right now.

Their online help is okay, but not as amazingly good as Icinga, for example. Icinga has the largest user base as far as I can tell and I use IRC for help a lot and there's a lot of people in it. There are few helping with Zabbix. The forums are pretty up-to-date.

As far as tech support itself, I have emailed them about the flapping issue, but the main issue that bothers me is the flapping and infrastructure monitoring which is not very good. The support team suggested a few tricks which would help but not as much as I want. The support team is responsive, but nothing was resolved.

We are actually looking for another solution that meets our needs better. That is not because Zabbix is necessarily a bad solution. Our needs changed and there are better solutions available.

I previously used ManageEngine OpManager in another organization, so I guess the reason as to why I switched was that I changed jobs. That product was excellent, but it is also out of the reach of my current budget.

Installation was not hard and it was very straightforward. The initial deployment without any complex setup took a few hours. Then the setup took an additional three days to a week. In total about a week to be completely deployed with all the servers monitored and everything working.

I did the deployment alone. I set it up and everything, and left it to other people to monitor as per their responsibility. I have 10 admins monitoring it. I've stopped monitoring it at this point, or in the half past year or so, as I am looking for a better solution.

The admins use it daily. Even now, I'm getting all the emails and I'm a little bit bothered from the continued flapping. Every admin is responsible for a different aspect of the monitoring so they get their dedicated reports. For example, one admin is responsible for the ELP servers, so he's getting only the email for the ELP related stuff.

We did not implement through a vendor. I did the implementation myself. It's very easy, you don't need anyone just to install it. For more complicated stuff that I was not sure of, I asked around on forums. I did the entire implementation myself and it's very easy.

Any product that is saving you from a network meltdown is really worth more than you pay for it. This product did its job and some are still using it in the organization while we search for a better solution.

I would rate this product a 7 out of 10. This is because it needs better flapping control and better infrastructure monitoring. Other products provide this already. I don't think I have much to say that isn't answered elsewhere. The product's benefit is that it is easy to get up and running. 

Open Source: All the sources for all the products are Open Source, so you can use a complete product from the start. There are no "premium" features with additional cost.

It gives you visibility over your infrastructure, so you are able to know the health of your services and it's dependencies every moment (and even to react automatically to problems). For example, in one organization I worked for, before Zabbix the problems were normally reported by the clients using the call center, so the Operations team was always working against the clock and with high levels of stress; after a successful implementation of Zabbix, putting the right monitors in place and a period of stabilization, the Operations team had the information to prevent the problems before the clients were affected. This resulted in a Operations team with lower levels of stress, more time to work on important projects and client satisfaction by lowering the number of problems visible by the client.

The low discovery functionality is still very young so this feature has a lot of room for improvement. The graphics generated by the system can be improved and also the web interface. At this point in time it's possible to archive a good level of security by using external tools, but it would be nice if this level of security could be archived out of the box.

I've been using the solution since version 1.4 which was around 2008, so I've been using the product for six years now.

Having the right knowledge, the installation and implementation of Zabbix it's very simple, even the principal Linux distributions already have a Zabbix version in their repositories. A successful implementations requires the knowledge of what it's necessary to monitor and the way to do it, but this is true for all monitoring products.

No, the software is very stable as well as the the components it depends on (in my case Linux, Apache, MySQL).

No, Zabbix is very scalable and well programmed, also gives you elements to identify when the performance could be a problem and can be configured in a very granulated way. Also, the principal components can be separated and gives you options to distribute the monitoring (archiving horizontal scaling).

Customer Service:

I don't have first hand experience with the Zabbix SIA support, but the support the community provides it's great.

Technical Support:

Based on the information I can see in the Zabbix forums and social networks I would say Zabbix SIA have engineers with an excellent technical level.

Yes, the principal reasons to switch to Zabbix were: Flexibility (Zabbix allowed the monitoring of something the other product does not), cost (no license costs, it was possible to monitor something with no extra costs, the hardware necessary for Zabbix was much lower) and in the tests Zabbix outperformed the other products evaluated.

The first time I installed the product (back in 2008) my initial impression was the software was complex to install, basically because at that time the repositories of my Linux distribution had an old version of the software and I wanted the most recent so I installed the software by compiling the sources; but once you understand, document and become familiar with the process it's pretty easy. Also, at the beginning understand the philosophy behind Zabbix was a little complicated but equally once you have the knowledge it all become easy and natural. Another aspect you can consider complex in Zabbix it's the lack of detail in some templates, so if you only use the out of the box templates (without changes) you ended up with a basic monitoring, most of the time you will need to extend the template to adjust it to your specific needs and obviously this will require knowledge of several aspects (this can be seen as an advantage or a disadvantage).

I've been responsible for about 4 Zabbix implementations and always was in-house job.

In this case, again, I don't have numbers. In the last implementation, the original cost was only the cost of the hardware plus the salary of the sysadmin responsible of the system, the day to day cost it's only the salary of the sysadmin. No fees for licenses and no fees for support at this time.

Yes. Nagios: This product it's the de-facto for open source network monitoring. System Center Operations Manager: The monitoring solution of Microsoft.

My advice is that its good to have a clear understanding of the goals you are looking to fulfill with the monitoring system, the objectives must be clear, also the environment in which the system will be implemented and the capacities (hardware, people, time, etc). There are a lot of aspects to take into consideration when choosing and implementing a monitoring system so invest as much time as possible in planning carefully. Zabbix is a great product, with great flexibility and I'm sure can be adequate to most of the situations, but maybe it's not the best choice in some scenarios, so plan carefully before choosing and implementing any product. For example, I would not suggest an in-house Zabbix implementation to a company without technical staff.

One of our services is implementation.

Basically what we're doing now in terms of use cases is we have customers that have implemented Zabbix including at one of the biggest banks out in Nepal and India. The basic monitoring for the banks are taken care of by Zabbix. Zabbix being open-source, has available APIs for any device or any service that can be easily mapped onto it for monitoring. 

If the customer comes and tells me that I need to monitor an ATM machine, typically, what happens is you need to go back to the OEM to ask for the API so that it can be integrated. However, in the case of Zabbix, we just need to get into the ATM machine or the contact OEM of the ATM and get the scripts for it and add it into Zabbix. It's that easy for us. 

Some customers may be using Zabbix, however, they don't know how to implement it. What we do is make our teams certified on Zabbix implementation. Sometimes customers may be using Zabbix but then have some issues in terms of configuration or they want to work on some specific reports that they need some help with. Getting in touch with Zabbix may be difficult  Therefore, we, as a partner, help out customers. If they need to do an implementation, we help them out in implementation and then with the support services.

We have our own certified guys who help the customers as a sort-of extended arm of Zabbix. Zabbix is open-source and therefore doesn't cost anything. That said, the configuration is something with which you need support, and it requires technical expertise. That's where we pitch in. We pitch and then we say, you download it and after that, whatever is required in terms of configuration, whatever it requires in terms of preparing reports, we can help with due to the fact that we are certified.

Easy addition of devices to monitor with customized thresholds and integrating with multiple tools for single dashboard.

The monitoring capabilities of the product are excellent.

The solution is quite mature and very stable.

The solution is very easy to scale.

The product is open-source, meaning there aren't any licensing costs associated with it.

• Action Log
• Agentless Monitoring
• Anomaly Detection
• Auditing
• Automated Actions
• Availability Reports
• Built-in Java Application Server Monitoring
• Capacity Planning
• Custom Scripts
• Custom Templates
• Data Retrieval
• Dependencies
• Distributed Monitoring
• Drill-Down Reports
• Encryption
• Event Correlation
• Hardware Monitoring
• History Data Analysis
• Issue Management
• Log Monitoring
• Messaging

• Metric Collection
• Mobile Apps
• Multiple Authentication Methods
• Multiple Severity Levels
• Native WMI Support for Windows Agent
• Network Discovery
• Notifications
• Optimized for High Performance
• Proactive Monitoring
• Real-Time Monitoring
• Root Cause Analysis
• Scaling to Large Environments
• Template management
• Trend Prediction
• True Open source
• User Permissions
• Virtual Marchine Monitoring
• WMI Support
• Web Services
• Widget-based Dashboards
• Zero-Maintenance

Zabbix isn't very good at automation just yet. It's something we are working on. The extent of automation and the scripts that we have in ManageEngine are much more than what Zabbix gives out. For Zabbix, what we are doing is, we are creating scripts and trying to run them, however, that's not always the right way to frame it. It would be much better if there was a tool within the solution itself.

The reporting is quite limited on the product. As an organization, what we did is we started utilizing a couple of connectors for the reporting. For example, we started using Power BI, and we started using Grafana. That's how we are enhancing our experience to the customers now. Zabbix doesn't give you a tool.

We are using Zabbix for the last three years now. 

On the stability front, we have never faced any issues. Zabbix has been in the market for many, many years, and has matured nicely. It's a very decent tool. 

The solution works with companies of various sizes. We have companies that are medium-sized, however, we also use this for enterprises.

I would recommend that enterprise customers start using Zabbix. Zabbix, being a free tool, saves a lot on operations. You remove out your license cost, and you don't have a maintenance cost, and it's only the housekeeping that is required. It's easy to take a contract with certified implementation partners to get going. For enterprise customers, if you go with any other tool, you pay licenses on 50 hosts or 100 hosts or 150 hosts. With this tool, you don't have to work with growing costs, and it still grows with you.

It's very easy to scale as you don't have a licensing model. You only have a proxy model. It's only that the client or the customer has to have a supported VM to add more hosts onto it. There's nothing that the customer loses. There's also no investment as such. It's just a matter of for VM to be popped up and then you can start adding those devices to make it scalable.

When it comes to the code level on the development of issues, we contact Zabbix directly. Everything else, we have a few different people that can handle it internally. If we fail on that is when we contact Zabbix. Over the last three or four years, we have only contacted Zabbix once for a technical issue. Otherwise, our team is capable enough 

They also have a good amount of data on the forums. It's very unlikely that we would need to get in touch with the support service as the forum itself is great in that it has huge amounts of data. Any issues that you have, you just browse the forum, and you get a response if you ask questions. 

For us, that has been a good experience.

Positive

We also use ManageEngine for monitoring.

Comparing the two is tricky. When it comes to Zabbix flow, I would not be comfortable working with Zabbix as there's a bit of a lack on the reporting and automation front. That's the negative part of Zabbix at this point in time. When it comes to ManageEngine, they have been very proactive. They have a very good reporting dashboard and they have very good automation. The only concern that comes to us when we go to the customer is that I can sell Zabbix at very low costs as I don't have any investment in it. I can fulfill almost 75 to 80% of the customer's request with very little overhead. However, when it comes to ManageEngine, it's expensive as you will need the licenses.

Even though ManageEngine gives you better reporting and automation, there's a cost to it. That is where we are trying to make Zabbix more efficient. We have started working on the automation front. When it comes to reporting, we have reached a level where we can say that we are okay with the reports. We are using a couple of other reporting tools to extend the data. However, with automation, we're starting at zero. That's where we are working hard.

The initial setup is a very simple process. It's only when it comes to configurations where it gets complicated. You need expertise so that you do the right configurations and set up the right parameters for the devices. Before that, it's very easy. You just follow the steps that have been given to you and you can just install it. 

For a basic installation, it takes just two days. You set up a VM and you have the basic configuration, and that part takes two days. Configurations, however, depend on each customer. Some customers need some devices to be monitored at track level, for example.

It doesn't require maintenance, per se, however, there is required housekeeping. That's how I would put it. For example, today you may have to put in a hundred devices for monitoring, but tomorrow you start decommissioning some devices. If you don't remove them out from Zabbix, then your dashboard itself is going to give you false alerts. That's why you need to have regular housekeeping whereby you know your map, and what is required. 

When it comes to upgrades, it is pretty easy. We have a change management process. We have never faced an issue on the maintenance spot as such with any of our customers. 

We handle the process for our clients. We've got a couple of clients who already have Zabbix on-premise. Typically we come in to configure the devices as per the parameters for that specific device. So that is something which you need expertise on the tool now. The customers are not able to do that. If they want to outsource the entire local operations to us, then we take it up. If they say no, that they want to run their own lock, then we put in our team and we stabilize their entire Zabbix implementation beside it. 

Depends on the environment and the existing product the customer is using .

The solution itself is open source and doesn't cost anything, however, many companies need technical expertise for configurations.

We are a certified implementation partner for Zabbix.

In our operations, we are the only certified implementation partners for Zabbix and just two months ago, we got certified for the Middle-East operations as well. When it comes to this region, we are the only certified implementation partners for Zabbix in the entire Middle-East.

We are working with the latest version and it getting upgraded right now. We have two environments basically. We have a production as well as a development (or staging) environment. Presently, our upgrades are going onto the staging environment. We have a go ahead on the staging environment after that. We will start on the production as we have around 50 to 70 customers who are already on the Zabbix. Directly upgrading it on the production is a challenge for us. We don't want to get into a situation where the entire thing goes down. We plan to roll the updated version around February.

Presently we have it on a hybrid module. With a primary running on the cloud and a secondary running on our data center, which is on-premise. This way, if the primary site goes down, we have a secondary site to support the customers. 

I'd recommend organizations try the solution, however, if they have issues, they should not just throw it out. The tool is capable. You just need implementation partners. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Low Level Discovery is imho the best feature in Zabbix. It will do some auto discovery of network devices, filesystems and snmp oid's.

If you are serious about your infrastructure then you have to know what is going on. With Zabbix we know when servers are using to much cpu, memory, disk IO, etc. Besides getting notified when something goes wrong, we are also now aware of how good our infrastructure scales, something that can save us money and frustrations.

Zabbix has it all except for predictive trending. This would be a nice extra feature. Also the SLA (it services) part can use some improvement.

I've used the product for about 2 years now, the company I work for was using it already before I joined. About a year ago I passed the Zabbix training course.

Deployment of Zabbix is easy and very straightforward. The only thing to do is install clients on your devices that you want to monitor. And even that is not always needed. It is also possible to do some checking from the server side. Also, it runs on almost every platform available on the market today.

Zabbix is written in C, developers have high standards before accepting code from the community. Zabbix itself uses little resources and is very stable.

If it scales then it is Zabbix. The only thing that can be in your way is the database and the hardware it runs on. As Zabbix uses a database you need descent hardware and a good DB if you have alot of machines to monitor with lots of items to check.

Customer Service: For us, as partner the support we get from Zabbix is great. We get answers quick and they always take our issues seriously.Technical Support: There is professional support from Zabbix SIA that can be bought. They even offer to develop custom features in Zabbix if you like. Of course there are also the Zabbix partners like the company I work for that can provide support.

Before I knew about Zabbix I was working at another company where we where using Nagios (opsview). Glad I had a chance to learn Zabbix, there is just no way to compare Zabbix. This is real time monitoring :)

Setup of Zabbix is easy. There is a great manual how to install and use it on most of the systems be it with rpm or deb or from source. It's probably the easiest open source monitoring platform to install. Also there are almost no dependencies needed that are not in the os already.

As a Zabbix partner and official trainer we of course did the setup on our own.

The product self is free there is no hidden cost or no cost for a enterprise version or some features that get disabled later. The product comes 100% free and it stays that way.

In our company we are always following the latest trends on the market so we try to follow them all as much as needed. Our preference goes mostly out to Zabbix of course.

Tweak the standard templates and make sure you don't run the DB on a virtual platform.

Our customers like Zabbix because it's an open-source tool, but integration with other tools is not that easy. The company that I work for employs talented people and a good integration team who can get the end-to-end implementation and integration done properly. 

Zabbix is basically network monitoring software. Often, we are working with various solutions that we are attempting to integrate with Zabbix, and at the same time, we're trying to integrate a couple of bots to take automation to the next level. 

We have been able to address all the monitoring challenges with Zabbix , which is in addressing all the concerns from the customers

Because Zabbix is an open-source tool, it makes it much easier for us to provide the customizations that customers want nowadays. The best thing about Zabbix is the integration and the speed of the included APIs, that's the beauty of this product. It's an enterprise-level tool that allows you to monitor it with a number of devices and hosts. The integration capabilities and APIs are the best part.

Currently, we're looking for more AI and ML related capabilities, which is missing from Zabbix at this point in time. There are tools out there with plenty of AI and ML capabilities and this is something that Zabbix needs to come out with. That would make this a great solution to sell. Essentially, they are trying to achieve automation by introducing external RP bots. If Zabbix could fix this issue, it would be a fabulous solution for us to sell and for companies to use.  

We have been using this solution for three years.

Currently, we have a support agreement with technical support, and we're happy with it. We have taken up a paid service on support models with them as a partner, but lately, our own developers have been solving any issues. So, for slightly over six months, we have not contacted Zabbit for support. 

Positive

The setup was free and because we use multiple tools, it was very easy for us. We had some teething issues, but the community is very good and helped us with that. The Zabbix community is very reliable and is quick to supply you with information when needed. 
The online support that we received from the community was very good and the KD was good enough for us to get it deployed. We didn't experience many challenges because we already had some concrete knowledge surrounding it. 

Deployment depends on the setup; I believe we had it installed in two days. Our customization depended on what level we were taking it to. We did all of the integrations and customizations ourselves, as required, but I believe we finished the base implementation within two days.

We have about 10 engineers, three to four of whom are certified on Zabbix and they take care of all maintenance related issues.  

I would recommend this solution to anyone interested in enterprise-level monitoring and integration. The only improvement I would suggest revolves around its AI and ML capabilities. Those are the only problems, at this point in time, that I see with this solution. If these issues are addressed and included in a future release, then this will be an end-to-end, fabulous product for monitoring and automation.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Zabbix a rating of nine, simply because the world is rapidly progressing toward an AI and ML environment. Whenever you check out a new product, from Moonsoft for example, most of the marketplace jargon revolves around AI. So, when we talk about AI, the customers are ready to just blindly buy the product without understanding if it is real AI and ML, truly capable of completing the task at hand. That's why we started using bots to automate steps; to show the customers that even Zabbix, as a solution, can be used for automation using bots. It's a tedious process, but it's a great method of comparison.  

On-premises

Microsoft Azure

We - msp - use this solution for enterprise-wide monitoring and alerting for network devices, appliances, Linux, Windows, Exadata, ODAs, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MySQL databases.

We detect problems before the customer does and before it actually happens using the predictive functions in Zabbix. Zabbix gives us a single point of truth.

The most valuable features are the low-level discovery, auto registration, host discovery, integration with other tools, and the zbxdb plugin for database monitoring

Very good templates

I would like to see a more flexible mobile client, and better HA out of the box.

It would also be very interesting to have a GUI on the proxy server[s]

I have been using this solution for eight years.

Stability of the product (servers and agents) was one of the key factors we checked. The agents normally have a low footprint and are very resource friendly.

Especially when using postgres with the timescaleDB option, the performance improved a lot because data deletion is now done by dropping partitions, which saves lot's of database time. We are confident that zabbix kan keep working for us while we grow. In the end, the bottle neck will be the database but we see a lot of options to stretch this.

Zabbix support works through various channels and works responsive. We are also very glad with the community support where we also share our experiences. Currently there is an active community in Telegram https://t.me/ZabbixTech

Earlier we used all kinds of other tools, all for a part of the stack. Oracle enterprise manager for oracle databases, PEM for postgres databases, SCOM for Windows, prtg for network, appman for applications. This required to run and maintain all those tools .... Now consolidating to 1 saves a lot of time and gives a single point of truth.

The initial setup is easy. Making it completely HA required some work but if you are familiar with the redhat tools it is not hard.

We implemented the zabbix solution our selves. A team consisting of a Linux admin and a postgres dba that both know Linux and zabbix setup the infra structure. The other teams gave input for their metrics, thresholds and views.

Combined with the other tools that we phased out the ROI will be within 1 year. One of the things we save a lot of money on is the replacement of SMS by an other notification service.

Make a POC, start simple and let it grow. The servers are created with good performance by design. Memory for the caching, both on the database as on the zabbix server are important. As database backend choose postgres with timescaleDB. This save many hours housekeeping processing. For proxies, sqlite will do nicely. Involve a dba for the database setup.

We checked the above mentioned options. Zabbix came out as a winner. Simple, good web application, no need for fat clients which makes maintenance simpler. Zabbix does not have the nicest GUI, compared with some above but it is certainly acceptable, especially when pricing is taking into account. Especially with the postgres database in combination with the timescaleDB options is has an excellent performance. It has a clean database design and handling.

If state of the art reporting is important, integrate with grafana. It can be done via the api and directly on the zabbix database.

If performance and scalability is important, use postgres with timescaleDB as database backend. This wins hands down compared to mysql.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Zabbix is fully open-source - no paid features/versions, so you get everything for free. Great, totally free product:

• It is very customizable and flexible - you can monitor almost everything.
• It has many great options - like auto discovery/registration, many types of alerting and templates provided by the vendor.
• It is easy to implement, easy to use for technical people.
• It is very stable, flexible and scalable.
• It has many great features ready to use right after installation.
• It is a little hard to understand for the non-technical user.

Zabbix allows us to monitor critical parts of our systems, track performance and utilization, and prevent outages.

It allows us to monitor specific parts of the system as well as control how the whole environment is doing.

With the great alerting system we always know which component might fail and can prevent it.

Adding new hosts/items is easy and quick and the great function for mass updating many components at once is very helpful as well.

Zabbix is a great tool and fairly easy for a technical person but it could be more friendly for non-technical staff.

We have been using the solution for two years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability. Zabbix is very stable. I can't remember a Zabbix server ever failing.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I've never contacted Zabbix technical support. I had no need to. The Zabbix forum was enough for my issues.

I switched from Nagios to Zabbix. For me Zabbix is more intuitive, flexible, offering more options out-of-the-box.

I didn't have troubles implementing it. The official documentation is more than enough.

Zabbix is free - no hidden costs, no paid features. Just download, install and enjoy.

I had the option to stay with Nagios or switch to Zabbix. I switched.

Make a plan for components you want to monitor, how these components are related, what groups and templates you want to create.

Also at the beginning don't be afraid to use templates provided by Zabbix - it will help you start. After that you can slowly tweak them or add new ones.

Make the database backup - that should be obvious.