Scalability, everything can be monitored.
System Integrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Scalability is extremely valuable.
What is most valuable?
What needs improvement?
Reporting is weak, if you want something better you must write your own SQL scripts/
For how long have I used the solution?
3 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Sometimes.
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Zabbix
April 2025
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Yes, web-page Zabbix server, database can be separate machine.
How are customer service and support?
Never used the technical support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Yes, previously used Cacti or Nagios but Zabbix has node communication.
How was the initial setup?
Straightforward, if you understand basic things about databases or web services, it's easy.
What other advice do I have?
All data is stored in the database. If you have more than 200 hosts you need a fast disk or good tuning of the OS/database.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Consulting System Engineer at ENEA
We value the auto-host discovery, template import, and bulk import/export features.
Pros and Cons
- "We value the auto-host discovery, template import, bulk import/export features. Newer versions also add nice features, such as multi-IP per host."
- "We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes."
Buyer's Guide
Zabbix
April 2025
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851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.
IT Administrator at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
The dashborad helps us to anticipate problems.
Pros and Cons
- "Dashboard and the customization of the items and triggers are the most valuable features."
- "It should be easy to modify the front end."
Associate Solutions Engineer with 501-1,000 employees
By proactively monitoring, it helped us to fix problems before any major disaster. Dashboards and reports can be improved.
Pros and Cons
- "It provides high scalability, alerting, notification, templating, and end-to-end security."
- "There are a lot of areas for improvement, specifically in the dashboards and reports functionalities."
IT Infrastructure Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I like its versatility the most. Its template is another valuable feature as hosts can be easily added.
Pros and Cons
- "It not only provides the preconfigured item monitoring feature, but it is also easy to configure custom items."
- "Even though it’s such a powerful monitoring system, it would be more helpful if it had a flexible UI."
Linux System Administrator at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution allows us to monitor critical parts of our systems, track performance and utilization, and prevent outages.
Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
May 24, 2017
My extended experience with Zabbix or how to cook toasts
Hi everyone,
I want to share a story about cooking toasts and tell you how we were expanding the functionality of Zabbix by a coil of wire and an integrated circuit Open Source solutions. First things first.
Imagine, you work in an organization (and it can be yours) where its business process is supported by one or more IT systems. There is a monitoring system. Then a little blurred vision, and it is not clear whether /the industrial system is free or Open Source. However, there aresituations when all the sensors aregreen, but the business process gives unexplained setbacks, showing a decrease of key indicators. Matter-of-factly, the situation is out of control and your intervention is required. It’s quite a common case. A systematical approach for solving this problem will provide a drafting services model.
Tom Wujec who provides services for the visualization of the processes occurring in the companies (not just IT), carried out a curious study. He asked different people to draw the process of toasting. See below for some results of this work.
What do we see on this pictures? Right you are. You can see objects and links presented in any system. The more you see them , the more the approach will be systematical. The correct degree of granularity will more accurately monitor the "health" of business system. To construct a circuit, you can try to use the Visio, but much more interesting is to take a marker to draw connections, adhesive sheets for objects and to portray your system on the whiteboard. The more is the quantity of yellow leaves, the more are the links, the higher is the chance to determine the maximum number of monitoring points for right resolving of the problem.
And now it's high time to tell you about our experience in the field of expansion of standard functional Zabbix and of systematical approach described above. There are exactly two of them.
The first is Mapping systems and the installation of thermal services’ card. In view of our considerable experience in the monitoring of the banking business processes, we give an example of exactly this area. Let’s consider three of the most common banking systems. If there is a more typical system in your bank it will not be considered here.
Home banking (online banking):
Enterprise serial bus (ESB):
Decision-making system (Credit convey):
In our application, it will look like this (yes, the structure is somewhat broken, but visibility still persists):
You can go to a lower level in case of need. And, last but not least, when you move the object pops up pop-up window with the description of the event and with a link to the graph in Zabbix
Through this approach, and given the level of details, we get friendly dashboards in the output, and at the same time a simple problem of localization tool. A few words about the features of our system:
- Visualization of the dependencies among enterprise systems;
- Set up of the degree of mutual components’influence (due weight);
- Integration with Zabbix (objects on the heat map are associated with flip-flops);
- Pop-up windows with text events when you hover over the event object;
- Visual Interface Communication Configuration objects;
- Visual communication setup interface of objects with triggers Zabbix.
As an example, some already developed interfaces.
Adding objects to a heat map:
Adding integrations from Zabbix:
Connecting Zabbix triggers to objects on the heat map:
The system is based on Google Charts and Bootstrap. While this is an alpha version, we plan to develop it further, adding useful pieces of industrial systems, which have been working successfully for many years. I will try to keep you in touch and to publish posts on the basis of practices developed.
The second experience is the integration with Zabbix and heat maps of synthetic transactions functionality. In fact, it’s a continuation of the heat map, and the look from the other side. Definitely controlling the system only from the application and infrastructure, you will not have the necessary information completeness. Synthetic transactions will allow having a look as a user and isolate the problem even before the first user requests to the Help Desk.
Synthetic transactions are based on the framework phantom.js (but nothing prevents you to go to casper.js, to pure selenium or anything else on your liking). In our test lab the execution of scenario is configured through cron and then the data are transferred to Zabbix by Zabbix trapper. As an example, the test scripts are logged into the MTS (Russia's mobile operator) personal account and receive money from the demand balance and the traffic in the Internet package (I can send it to you if you interested in this script). In the banking community, the most likely use of this tool can be, for example, online banking. Nobody will prevent you to log into the system and flip 1 dollar from one account to another.
Collected items from our example are as follows:
Each has its own schedule.
I do not want to say that the use of Open Source solutions monitoring is a tablet from all troubles. I will reveal an open secret: as in physics, there is the law of conservation of money and effort. The more money you invest into a finished product, the less effort for improvement, and vice versa. Always should be guided by common sense, the available budget and the human factor: ready to be your team to throw in the recess of business monitoring on the first call?
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
Top 20Mar 4, 2016
Highly recommended open source monitoring software for servers and network monitoring
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Zabbix is good solution considering open source platform. It meets customer basic needs . Inbuilt dashboard and report capabilities needs to improve more.
Regards
Sameer