Zabbix Reviews

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.

We are using Zabbix just to monitor our small network out here.

The integration with third-party tools and the alerts are most valuable.

We would like to monitor other touchpoints such as ATM machines. It would be great if it can provide monitoring of ATM machines. Compatibility with other products would also be great.

We have been using this solution for two or three years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. We have two people who are using this solution.

There are a lot of professionals and sites available, so we just get help from them.

We were not using any other solution.

It is reasonable.

Our requirements are basic, and it is fulfilling them. I would rate Zabbix a seven out of 10.

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.

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.

We are implementing this solution for our clients. 

What we find the most valuable about Zabbix is that it is open source and there are no licensing costs.

While there are a number of benefits to Zabbix being open source, getting that trust from the customer is a little bit on the challenging side. Implementation is always tailored to the customer and the kind of information we need from the client to carry it out can make them very uncomfortable. Sometimes the clients are not ready to share it.

It can also be difficult for us to formulate a price for clients that need a solution for which there is no template. If we can implement a solution with the help of a template, we know how much time and effort it will take so it is easy to estimate a price for the customer. Without templates, estimation is a little bit challenging. 

In addition to the above, although there are templates available for Cisco switches, they do not work for all families of Cisco switches.

These are the challenges we are facing at our company. Overall, setting up Zabbix is a challenge. However once it is setup, managing it is comparatively easy.

We have been using Zabbix for a year, I suppose. 

Zabbix is quite stable once it is set up. We haven't had any post-setup issues. 

We are regularly in touch with Zabbix's technical support. Generally, there is little bit of challenge because of the time zones. Nonetheless, their tech support is not bad. It's good.

We did not previously use a different solution. Zabbix was the first solution we worked on. However, right now we are in the process of exploring other solutions.

We are evaluating Motadata. This is a solution based out of India. We are in touch with them, but we are in the very initial stages. We also don't know how it will work out.

Whether or not setup is straightforward or not will depend on the client's use case. From our end, the issue is estimating the effort it will take for us to implement the solution for our clients. We run into issues when it comes to giving the clients a quote for our work ahead of time. 

Because Zabbix is an open source solution, a lot of customization is required. In turn, a lot of information has to be provided by the client about exactly what they want, which parameters they want to monitor, and what the thresholds are. Proprietary solutions would already have those thresholds in place. Once this process is done, it's really very good for your organization. But it does take a lot of work.

We monitor Zabbix for different clients. In total, there are less than 40 users, using this solution. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and continue using Zabbix.

I have been using this solution for the past few months. 

It hasn't really been that stable, but I think that has a lot to do with the specs. It could be more stable.

Zabbix is scalable.

I would absolutely recommend Zabbix to others. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Zabbix a rating of eight. Once I have more experience with it, maybe I'll give it a higher rating. 

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.

I primarily use this solution in some of our different monitoring systems, including our different servers, and applications. We use it for the maintenance of the main server in the laboratory.

The ability to connect with monitoring is very useful for us. It's great that we can monitor different applications. We can even monitor remotely.

I recently tested the solution's ability to hold up to rebooting machines remotely and we were able to do so with ease. 

There are lots of great features and functionality within the solution.

So far, we've found the solution to be quite stable.

The product has a large community and therefore has lots of documentation around various aspects of the product.

I don't recall coming across missing features. It's a fairly complete solution.

The user interface could be a bit better. They could update it a bit.

The solution offers very good stability. It doesn't have bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze on us. It's been reliable from the very start.

I have never tried to scale the solution. I can't speak to its level of scalability.

However, it is my hope that it is. It's important to be able to scale it.

We only currently have 10 people on the solution. It's a small group and therefore we haven't yet had a need to expand it.

While I haven't ever actually reached out to technical support, I'd say that it would important to have access. If there was a question the community couldn't answer it would be nice to know if we could turn to Zabbix directly for assistance. 

We did previously use a different solution prior to Zabbix. It was a suite of applications that included, for example, DLP and myShell. I haven't used it in a very long time, so I can't speak too much about my experience with it or how it compares.

The initial setup isn't overly complex. It's largely straightforward.

There's also a fairly sizable community around the solution and there's just so much documentation and insights from other users you have access to, therefore it's very easy to find answers to your questions when it comes to implementation.

We use a free community version of the solution. We don't have to pay for licensing. 

I'm not really a user. I deploy the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.