Zabbix Reviews

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.

The solution can be used to monitor both on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

The flexible licensing model is one of the solution's most valuable aspects. It really allows for great flexibility for companies.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The NetFlow integration really could be improved upon. In general, integration with other solutions and services needs to be worked on.

The documentation could be improved. I find that it's a bit limited.

It runs on a Linux backend, and we're using it to monitor our Windows platforms. For people who are not familiar with Linux, there may be issues. You do need to have a bit of Linux knowledge before beginning, otherwise, you may have problems working with it.

We've been using the solution for two months at this point. It hasn't been a very long period of time.

The stability of the solution is good. It's reliable. There aren't glitches or bugs. It doesn't crash or freeze. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is quite good. If you need to scale the solution up, you can do so. It's pretty straightforward. We haven't had any issues so far.

In our organization, we have about 1,600 users on the product.

We most likely will increase usage in the future.

We've used technical support in the past. They have different platforms that handle requests at different levels. The gold platform, for example, offers support but is slightly limited. 

The initial setup isn't complex at all. It was very straightforward.

In terms of deployment, it takes about a day, however, you have to add in all the other items that you're monitoring. We deployed everything and then rolled it out over the course of a couple of weeks.

I handled the implementation myself. I didn't need to solicit the help of a vendor, consultant, or integrator. 

The licensing is great on Zabbix. It's very flexible and great for various types of businesses.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Zabbix.

I'd recommend the solution. It's easy to use and it's been quite useful. New users do have to be pretty comfortable with Linux, however, otherwise, they may have a hard time adapting to the system.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall.

On-premises

I was using Zabbix as a monitoring tool at my previous job, although I have left that company and am no longer using this type of product. We were using it for monitoring routers and a few thousand other devices. We had visibility as to their status.

The most valuable feature is the alert and alarm monitoring.

If Zabbix had a better dashboard then it would be nice.

I had been working with Zabbix for three years.

The stability is very good.

We had between 20 and 30 users and more than 2,000 devices.

I have not personally been in contact with technical support.

Prior to using Zabbix, we used Nagios. We switched because it became unstable and clumsy when we grew to have more than 2,000 devices. Zabbix was much better in terms of scalability.

I don't recall all of the details related to the initial setup, although I remember that it was not quite easy. We had to conduct quite a few searches on Google during the process in order to properly understand how to install it. If I remember correctly, there were a couple of errors.

We had two engineers who were responsible for maintenance.

Overall, I think that Zabbix is an awesome tool and I would use it again, rather than another one. For us, Nagios was a disaster and Zabbix was the savior. We didn't require any functionality that it didn't already have. My only complaint is that the dashboard needs to be improved.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

To monitoring our prod, pre-prod, and test environments.

Simple, we know everything about our infrastructure, problems, etc.

• DBforBIX
• Auto-discovery.

It's OK for me as is, but some frontend improvements would be nice.

More than five years.

Monitor systems and networks devices and web applications. Increase monitoring by including powershell script and automation on incidence responses.

We are now more pro-active before an issue appears to our customer because all the layers are now converged by Zabbix monitoring.

In addition, this monitoring product is easier to maintain, configure and less expensive in the total cost of ownership than the others.

The most valuable features are its performance (scalability) in monitoring, the monitoring centric (agent compatibility with the large vendors OS, SNMP, IPMI, JMX), VMware monitoring, web monitoring, capacity planning and the proxifying monitoring.

The capacity planning feature and SLA monitoring need to be improved.

The capacity planning feature should give to administrator recommendations regarding the actions to be done on systems to ensure scalability and stability. In addition, currently this feature only provides basic information (disk usage time left, cpu consumption forecast, etc.). You cannot predict easly the capacity planning of virtual infrastructure or scale-out network storage.

There were no stability issues experienced because the server component is compiled in C and is separated from the web dashboard (PHP).

There were no scalability issues experienced because Zabbix is optimized for a high performance. The Zabbix server and the Zabbix proxy use various data caching solutions, giving them great performance and reducing the load on the back-end database.

We have a partnership with a solution integrator, so we don't open a case directly with Zabbix LLC.

Previously, we were using Nagios coupled with Centreon. We switched because Centreon has some paid features and so, there are some hidden costs. In addition, we needed to use an agent in our client OS because some metrics are deprecated by SNMP and are only available via WMI; WMI is known for its performance problem in monitoring.

The setup was very simple, it is very well-documented and packaged for a lot of Linux distribution.

This product is free, i.e., no vendor lock and all the features are included without the Enterprise Edition. However, just like the other products used in production, it's better to subscribe to a support contract.

We looked at other solutions; stay with Centreon's newer version.

The only advice is:

• To read the documentation before implementing.

• Test the software with the appliance (i.e., only for testing and not for the production environment).

• Participate with the community on the forum.

This software is the most powerfull monitoring tool that I know. Actually since 2005, when I started to work with ZABBIX, this software keeps growing and growing. Each new version ZABBIX SIA company (who maintain this software) delivers improvements and new features that help IT professionals to take care of their infrastructure. Some of the main features:

• Automated network discover (ICs, servers, switches, routers, etc)
• Automated item/metric discovery (partitions, network interfaces, users, databases, virtualhosts, etc)
• Flexibility to 'learn' things (is trivial to extend ZABBIX features)
• All things (historical data, configuration, etc) are in database
• Automated inventory hosts (hardware and software)
• Web monitoring (a robot to check websites)

ZABBIX is a 'all-in-on' monitoring solution. We don't need any other monitoring tool since we use ZABBIX.

Actually we are ZABBIX partners (premium and training) to Brazil and LatAm and our goal is to help other companies using ZABBIX.

I think ZABBIX needs improved report functions. Since ZABBIX version 1.8 we are using the ZABBIX API to integrate ZABBIX data with others tools (Pentaho, QlikView, etc.) when ZABBIX built-in reports are not enough.

I've been using ZABBIX since 2005.

None.

None.

In some scenarios/projects we need to adjust ZABBIX components (agents, proxies, nodes, GUI, database, etc) in line with each one. What I mean is that we need to know ZABBIX and also know the customer's environment to have a successful deployment without stability and scalability issues.

Customer Service: ZABBIX SIA has almost 70 partners around the world and services are delivered in local customer languages :)Technical Support: ZABBIX SIA partners has levels (Reseller, Certified and Premium) and Premium partners are the best ones :)

Yes, we used a lot of other monitoring tools (6 at the same time with distinct functions). We switched to ZABBIX because:

• ZABBIX is a 'all-in-on' monitoring solution
• ZABBIX is 'true open source'
• ZABBIX is 'Commercial/Professional' supported
• ZABBIX has a 'centralized' approach. All things are done using the ZABBIX GUI

Its depends, if the customer environment is complex, the initial setup will be same. Here (at Unirede) the initial setups are always straightforward because we already have good expertise with ZABBIX and infrastructure areas.

In-house team.

Our setup was done with a in-house team and the costs are a 'ZABBIX Certified Specialist' to take care. But we are a ZABBIX Premium Partner and our customers choose ZABBIX (instead other commercial softwares) mainly because a ZABBIX deployment is not too expensive ;)

Of course. We need to check other oprions all the time. Some software we evaluated: Nagios, Zenoos, HypericHQ, PandoraFMS, BigBrother/Quest.

People need do a POC (Prove of Concept) to check if ZABBIX will fit in their needs. We also have a lot of blogs talking about 'Monitoring Solutions' and a lot of 'comparisons', but I think the best way to start is to choose to work with a ZABBIX Partner around the world and talk about your needs.

In my primary experience with this solution, Zabbix was used to monitor the IT infrastructures of a SCADA system in electrical substations. It was about network supervision of routers and switches that are used to communicate with electricity installations through RTU (Remote Terminal Unit).

Zabbix has improved the quality of monitoring because of the user-friendliness of its Graphical User Interface, so is easy to use even for non-IT employees.

Customizable network maps and email alerts or the intuitive web interface had made Zabbix very useful. 

I really enjoy network traffic triggers that allow us to check traffic threshold from ISP.

They should open an SSH session from the web interface.

I have been using Zabbix for four years. I discovered this very efficient network monitoring tool in a course from my engineering training and stuck to it!

The only Zabbix support that I use is Zabbix Telegram and Discord Community.

Positive

Zabbix was my first love for network monitoring and I just adopted it. I did not previously try a different solution.

The initial setup is very easy, with a few command lines. For simple network monitoring, there is no need to install any special packets on the Linux server.

My first installation was Zabbix 3.2 on a CentOS 7 Linux Server. The very difficulty that I faced was the fear of the unknown!

i implemented this solution through a very small in-house team where no one was a Linux expert.

Zabbix is open source and free. There are no hidden costs for any features or licensing. So, I would advise hat other s use this product.

When I was looking for the best solution for our monitoring needs, before choosing Zabbix, i had evaluated other tools options like Nagios.

With regards to COVID-19, Zabbix's meetup and training were 100% online and were very helpful for keeping in touch with network engineers around the world, despite social restrictions.

On-premises

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.

On-premises