Zabbix Reviews

I implement Zabbix for large companies with over 5,000 employees.

In the near future, we are going to see integration with its cloud platform.

We would like to use it for RBI, for service and credibility reports for our manager and management staff, and we also hope to use it to deliver customer scripts, etc. Currently, because we monitor over 5,000 hosts and servers, we need to use open source. 

I have used Zabbix for the last five years.

Zabbix is both stable and scalable. As I mentioned earlier, we scale more than 5,000 hosts.

Currently, our own team provides support, but in the future, we may use Zabbix support.

We also use Nagios, but we are going to stop using this solution as it has specific limitations that we require. 

For us, the initial setup was complex. We plan on integrating Zabbix with Prometheus and Grafana for a smooth relationship between dashboards. 

We purchased Zabbix for a good price, including support. It's cheaper than Datadog and ScienceLogic.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Zabbix a rating of nine, strictly because we would like to see better integration with mobile TeleCloud.

We use it in a pretty traditional way. We replaced an older system based on something called Nagios, and we had a lot of trouble with false positives. Basically, we install the Zabbix agent on the client hosts and set up automatic installs. It automatically adds these other client hosts, and we have the infrastructure in place to support static servers. 

Then, we write the rules to tell Zabbix how we want it to report, and then we basically let it run. If we've got a critical error, someone's going to get notified. Otherwise, we'll just get an email message saying something is having a problem. 

Sometimes, the problems resolve themselves, and sometimes, they don't, and we have to take action. But it's pretty hands-off for the most part. It's doing really well for that.

It has improved our server performance monitoring overall. We know right away when there are problems. It has built-in statistics, so we can go back and see if there's spiking. We can check what's happening every day around the same time and check the configuration to see if there's something that's running and needs to be fixed. As we get better at diagnosis, we can go back and look at the history of the systems to pinpoint problems.

There's a feature I like. There's a way you can pull up graphs and basically take the parameters you want to check-in. You can see the current day, week, or month. It's all built-in, whatever the tool is. We use it to bring up graphs of specific parameters.

Sometimes, the documentation is a little bit written in Estonia – a country in Europe. The language barrier and translation to English can sometimes make it difficult to understand what they're trying to get at. It's just a language thing.

We can usually figure it out, but that's the biggest thing I can think of. Other than that, it's been extremely reliable. 

I have been using it for four years now. 

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten; it's still really stable. We rarely have problems. And it's always been something else, like the database acting up or whatever. It's usually an external thing. It's usually not the Zabbix code itself.

Scalability is good. We've set up with what are called proxies. That will... I mean, since the system is receiving a lot of data, you could potentially put a real load on the server. But when they designed it, they included proxies that could handle some of the load from their respective clients and then feed that to the main server. This reduces the load. 

As a matter of fact, for checks, they usually prefer that you use checks based on the data that's automatically flowing from each host rather than doing explicit checks or things like... don't go on this server and run a command except for a check. Just use the built-in checks, and we mostly do that. 

Some people when they switch over to Zabbix, they're not used to that. They're used to always adding regular checks, but sometimes it won't work. So, you can change it to be more on the passive check side, where the hosts don't have to do anything, and it's actually displayed on the server.

We've hardly had to use their direct customer service. We mainly use their forums if we have issues that aren't super critical but still need addressing. It's mostly community support, which is free, and we can get a bit of information by asking questions there. It's not really direct support, but more like community support.

We actually paid for support for the last couple of years and decided that we've got it under control. We're not paying for support anymore, so we feel confident enough to manage it ourselves.

Positive

The previous product was really outdated and, literally, it was broken.

We were afraid it was so unstable it would just stop working entirely. It was running but struggling. For example, it would get behind on its checks, and once it got too far behind, it would just throw them all away and start over. It was constantly missing things. It was clearly overloaded and not designed for our scale, so we were happy to move away from it. The difference after switching to Zabbix has been night and day.

I used to get paged at least once a day, sometimes multiple times. Now, with Zabbix, there might be weeks without any pages. We've never had a problem where we missed an alert.

One thing is that the checks are much more intelligent. For example, rather than just saying, tell me when the load goes over five, you can say, "Tell me if the load is over five for more than ten minutes." So, if it doesn't go over for ten minutes, you'll never get notified. It only waits for a combination of conditions to be true before it alerts you. That really cuts down a lot on the false positives.

We used Nagios.

I'm not the person who set it up. We have a kind of person in charge; he did most of the work. And then a lot of us – most of us do our tech work on the templates and things. We don't really work on the core of the product.

It's a small team. One main person and then two or three support people help him with specifics, like setting up the databases and things like that. So, supporting those kind of tasks. So, it's maybe three or four people. And a lot of us know how to use it pretty much. Some people are better at things in other situations, so we just need to fully share that knowledge.

The main person's role is systems administrator. 

We have one to two people for maintenance. The person who runs the updates isn't the main developer. We have another guy; he's really good at that. We'll all connect to a remote call like a Zoom call, and we'll actually kinda watch. We can see how things are working. That way, it's nice we can share information about how things are working.

For pricing, it's free. We don't pay anything for it. They open-source the code, and people pay for support. 

We don't pay anything. I almost feel kind of bad. We should be thinking of something because it's been really reliable. If we don't need the support, we don't need the support.

I would recommend Zabbix to others. It's been really good. We've been very pleasantly surprised at how well it's worked and how much of an improvement it is on the system we had before. It's night and day.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. One thing is a little clunky about it. We provide this hosting service to a bunch of different groups, and by default, you can only see the servers that are in our group. So, when we log in with our normal IDs, all we can see are the servers from our monitoring group. If I want to see other servers, I have to log in differently. 

It's a safety thing, which is good, but it would be nice if there was a way to log in and see everything, and yet, have a read-only view where you could just see stuff and not have to be authenticated to change anything.

I use Zabbix to monitor the threats in the IT infrastructure. 

Zabbix helps to save time. 

The solution needs to add remote features. 

I have been using the solution since 2017. 

I rate Zabbix's stability an eight out of ten. 

My company has 20 users for the product, but around 60 people enjoy the benefits of it. I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

I have yet to reach out to the support. 

Zabbix's installation is easy. It is also easy for customization. 

The tool's licensing costs are yearly. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We are a solution provider and Zabbix is one of the products that we implement for our clients. I am the senior consultant for Zabbix in my organization.

The use cases are pretty basic. They include memory and disk monitoring, database monitoring, log file monitoring, and application monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the trigger dependencies.

The documentation is good.

Zabbix has a roadmap and they are continuously and frequently adding new features. Most of the features are good.

The reports are not great and should be improved. In other tools, we can schedule reports and fetch them. However, with Zabbix, we cannot export reports. It is possible to export some of the data but our monthly reports, including those for performance and availability, cannot be exported.

This product is not highly available by default. I have read that in the next major version, 6.0, they are planning to do that for the proxies.

I have been working with Zabbix for between three and four years.

This is a very stable product.

This solution is scalable and I have no issues with it in that regard. We have five to six people that use it. They primarily do admin work.

There are two or three who architect and design solutions. We add and manage servers, as well as perform maintenance.

We do not have a Zabbix technical support subscription. We manage it ourselves.

The blogs that are available online are okay.

There are a few problems but if they fix them, then Zabbix is a very good tool compared to others. This includes tools that you have to pay for.

The initial setup for the Zabbix server is pretty straightforward. 

Initially, it was just a single node, so the deployment didn't take long.

This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge. Support is something that you have to pay extra for.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Zabbix is to read the documentation and go through the use cases before beginning the implementation. Many use cases are available online.

I would rate this solution 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 have two Zabbix servers, deployed locally and in our New York datacenter, and we use them for monitoring traffic. It is an order processing system and we need to schedule and monitor our infrastructure.

Zabbix is very easy to implement.

The interface is customizable, so we can create the dashboard that we need.

We need to set it up step by step in order to ensure that it is stable and works properly.

If you want to use all of the features then you have to pay a licensing fee.

I have been using Zabbix for approximately one year.

We use Zabbix on a daily basis and we haven't had any issues with stability.

We have not needed to expand it because our infrastructure is very small. It includes a server and some VMs.

When we have a problem, we search the web site for how to resolve it. We have never had an issue that necessitated contacting technical support.

In my last job, I worked with Nagios. I found that Zabbix is a good system for monitoring and it is easier to implement, and it is also less expensive.

The initial setup is easy to do. It involves implementing agents in the server, but it is not difficult.

We implemented it with our in-house team that is also responsible for maintenance. This includes updates to the product. There is a team of three administrators who manage it.

Zabbix is free but if you use it in production then you have to pay for it. It is not expensive if you compare it to something like the Amazon monitoring system.

Also, it is an open-source product, although some features are available at an extra cost.

Overall, this is a great tool and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

As a network services provider we use Zabbix to monitor network infrastructure and customer services. I have also set instances for a number of government institutions to monitor their entire ICT Infrastructure. I will focus on the largest instances, the service provider use cases.

I used Zabbix to monitor network devices, servers, databases, virtual machines, services and applications. For the network services provider, I run an instance for our internal infrastructure and another instance for monitoring our customer services so they can have access to monitor the state and status of their services, SLA, view utilization graphs on demand or in real time and produce needed reports and also receive alerts when problems happen

We could easily monitor anything on our infrastructure and customer services using Zabbix as a consolidated solution for all the network infrastructure and customer services monitoring needs , as Zabbix is highly flexible and customizable to fit the specific needs of organizations.

Zabbix has greatly improved  operations and maintenance by helping management and technical teams be more proactive. They can easily spot problems or undesired states on the infrastructure or customer services

With the Zabbix out-of-box multitenancy support,  customers can have restricted access to their service utilizations and other operational data in real time or on demand. The feedback from customers shows they are very happy and they appreciate how easy it is to learn using it.

Time to work on issues is greatly reduced, as Zabbix provides powerful alerts and details into what is happening in our network. Issues that could take weeks to resolve can now easily be spotted in a few minutes as all essential metrics for all devices are monitored in real time.

Zabbix fits well with the multi-vendor environment and it has a lot of out-of-box templates that can be customized to fit our needs.

We can easily provide infrastructure status reports with Zabbix. We can produce reports even for old devices that were not properly and consistently monitored since they were installed.

Zabbix is highly customizable and flexible, which makes it easy to have all our monitoring needs accommodated. Many elements like auto-discovery, dashboards, templates, graphs, maps, metrics, SLA's can easily be customized to fit specific needs

Zabbix has a powerful API that support integration with third party software, automation and creating new applications. It can be easily integrated with other  tools as a data ingest, processing or visualization platform. The API allows for utilizing better software in specific areas that Zabbix may be lacking like Grafana which allows for more customizable dashboards.

Auto Discovery and Custom Actions are greatly helpful in doing mass discovery, the grouping of hosts, and templates association. The flexibility in setting discovery rules and actions is really helpful for complicated use cases.

Multi-tenancy support which a result of granular use roles, automatic actions, tags, and host grouping. User permissions can be limited to specific sections, services, applications, device groups, access level etc. This has proven to be very helpful for our customer's services monitoring instance.

Out-of-box templates that are customizable, can be changed or modified to suit specific use cases. Additional items can be added to these templates and more filtering or pre-processing rules can be specified in these templates

It has an intuitive UI with beautiful graphs and customizable maps. Although more powerful solutions can be used, Zabbix caters for all our needs in that area as it provides the flexibility we need.

Zabbix provides regular updates and a clear and timed roadmap. Very helpful as our c company can see whether  expectations will be taken care in coming releases of the software.

Although Zabbix is great, the documentation is a bit lacking. The documentation gets a bit messy between versions and is not too detailed, the learning curve is steep and can be difficult for first-timers, especially when they run into issues.

Zabbix depends on other open-source projects, so it would be a good idea to add more information on fine-tuning a Zabbix instance especially the essential details when working with specific choices of OS, database, webserver etc. I had to do most of the things with limited resources in the fine-tuning of the database, OS, and other packages. Although not entirely a Zabbix issue it is a good idea to provide guidance on the basics.

Automatic maps. It would be great if Zabbix could create automatic topology maps using discovery protocols like LLDP or CDP.

Automatic Updates of host templates. It would save a lot of time if that could be done with new releases while keeping personal configurations intact.

Out of box high availability setting for all sections of Zabbix

I have been using Zabbix for four years

This is a very stable solution. It is a low maintenance solution and if finetuned and optimized properly can handle a heavy workload with minimum resources.

This product is highly scalable.  HA and redundancy can be set for database, proxy and front-end.

Zabbix experts provide great ideas on the open-source forums for the products. The Zabbix community, including the CEO and the technical experts, are friendly. Since they are doing great with the community, I am confident they are doing great with their optional Technical Support which we have not subscribed to.

Positive

I had used other solutions before but the licensing was too expensive for our company and still, other solutions were limited because we have a multi-vendor environment.

The setup is a bit complex but can be done with the right  skills. More important than the initial setup is optimization and finetuning which requires multiple skills.

We implemented it in-house. I primarily worked on the database, Zabbix server, Zabbix proxy, frontend and other server side stuff. I also prepared agent and SNMP configuration scripts for other Engineers to implement on network devices and servers.

I can confidently say that our ROI is 100%.

Zabbix is open-source so if one wishes to implement it in-house, they must have qualified professionals to set up and optimize databases, Linux/Unix OS, PHP, Apache, and depending on what is monitored, a full-stack network and systems administrator may be needed.

Zabbix provides support although we have not subscribed to the support. We implemented the instances on our own and we also operate and maintain them on our own.

We had to evaluate several options including SolarWinds NPM, PRTG, OpenNMS, Cacti, Nagios, and Zenoss Core. We used Huawei U2000, Cisco Prime and PRTG for some devices before we switched to Zabbix.

Overall, Zabbix is a great product. I have been using it for almost two years, and I am very happy with it.

Monitoring systems and services that don't have their own solution in our environment. Single place to monitor multiple systems and processes. We monitor servers, websites, key card devices, etc..

Before we didn't really have a centrally managed monitoring solution, so adding this product has been a blessing as we are able to actively monitor and react accordingly. Being able to monitor almost any device in one location is extremely convenient.

The feature which I like the most would have to be the GUI. At first, I was put off, as I felt it was too complex or busy. Upon using it to setup devices, I found it was well laid out and has come a long way.

The agents are also very easy to install and manage, making this more of a turnkey solution for most.

I wish it had more options for personalizing the product, such as being able to include your company's logo without editing text files. More templates for specific devices.

More than three years.

None yet. Runs solid on very light resources.

Not yet, but as of now, it's a single server - might have to dive in at some point with the proxy configuration.

I have used publicly available resources. I can't comment on their customer service.

We used Cacti, which worked well for our uses. We moved because we needed a more updated solution that had support for a myriad of devices. The community is also active in development of plugins.

It's a decently complex system to get setup, it's not a simple package based system (well technically it is, but not as easy as others). It's also not as extreme as Nagios or Prometheus. We added Grafana, which made it a little more complex.

In-house team.

Time and knowledge. Without it, we wouldn't have known of current issues in our environments. It allows us to deep dive and get to the core issues quicker.

It's open source, so no cost/licensing needed.

Nagios, Prometheus, Check_MK, Adagios, Icinga 2, Zenoss, PRTG, and Cacti.

Zabbix coupled with Grafana (there's a plugin for Zabbix, very easy to setup), is a great monitoring stack. Leveraging "Let's Encrypt for SSL" is also a must!