Zabbix Reviews

Many of my customers want to replace enterprise products from Micro Focus, IBM, Computer Associates, eMT, etc., with Zabbix. They don't want to pay a high price for many modules and pieces of software, so they switch to an open-source product. 

I work for a software development company that produces a product, but it's not like Zabbix. We make an umbrella people-management solution, but we also integrate Zabbix. We typically offer customers a people management and business intelligence solution integrated with Zabbix for monitoring. We tell them Zabbix can meet all their monitoring needs, including servers, websites, applications, networks, etc. 

I like the Zabbix Interface. There are links to every menu. You can choose a node and right-click to pick a suite or go to alarms, support, graphs, etc. The software and server monitoring are excellent. The reporting has also improved considerably compared to the older version. 

Our customers also like that they don't have to use multiple modules. Micro Focus and major vendors typically require you to buy several modules and plugins. Our customers do not like that. We offer them a single product for all their monitoring needs. 

Zabbix needs to work on the network monitoring part. The competing products provide a network map. Zabbix lacks an adequate networking map. It has a map but it's static, it's not dynamic.

I have sold Zabbix for three years.

I rate Zabbix eight out of 10 for stability.

I rate Zabbix 10 out of 10 for scalability.

Implementing Zabbix is difficult. I've deployed many solutions over the years, and Zabbix is the hardest to implement. You have to do some development to get it to work with IBM, Micro Focus, or HP products. 

You can find some plugins or an integration package in the Zabbix community, but you'll always need to custom-develop something. Enterprise products aren't open-source, so creating a new integration is challenging. You may need to pay for software production professional services, which are expensive.

Many people in my country fail to implement this product. They say, "This is open-source, so I can implement it myself." However, it isn't easy in the beginning. An IT technician who has no experience with network or server monitoring tools will find it difficult to plan this implementation. They call us for help.

You need one person to implement the product, but you need help from the customer side. We need someone familiar with the customer's network, database, etc. The person implementing Zabbix needs to know Linux and have some programming knowledge. 

My customers are large enterprises monitoring thousands of devices. With commercial software, they must pay incredibly high licensing fees, and support costs are worse. 

When they replace their solutions with Zabbix, the return on investment is immediate because they don't pay support or licensing fees. They're saving more than $1 million in some cases. Some customers are paying upwards of $2.5 million for software support alone. These commercial solutions usually have several modules that are difficult to maintain and upgrade. 

It is open-source, but you can buy official Zabbix support. I will purchase this for my customers upon request. 

I rate Zabbix nine out of 10. If you're thinking about implementing Zabbix, you need to understand that deploying an open-source solution can be challenging. You must carefully plan your implementation. 

If you don't have a plan, you'll need to restart over and over. The planning phase is crucial, and millions of free video tutorials are online. I suggest studying these before starting a Zabbix project. They explain how to plan your deployment and install Zabbix. 

Our use case for Zabbix involved installing an agent-based tool to manage and control our workstations. We needed to gather information about parameters such as configurations. Zabbix proved highly flexible and adaptable to our needs, although there was a learning curve due to scripting requirements. However, the tool is easy to deploy and offers flexibility in usage and configuration.

We use Zabbix to monitor our organization's IT infrastructure and workstations. We don't use Microsoft Intune since it's expensive. The tool's real-time alerting system has proved crucial for us, particularly when a new device joins a network that is not one of our own devices. It notifies us about the presence of this new device, allowing us to investigate further. Additionally, it alerts us about disk usage, memory usage, and the software installed on the machine. 

The most valuable feature for me is its configurability. Zabbix provides a shell I can install on every machine, giving me control over them. This highly configurable shell allows me to customize it according to my needs. For example, I wanted to know all the software installed on each machine in detail, not just from the registry. So, we created a custom script for this purpose. We deployed the script, which runs monthly, providing details of all installed software and updates on each machine.

Tasks that would typically take three or four days to complete can now be completed in a single day. For example, if I ask my team to provide an inventory of all online assets and their status, Zabbix can generate this report within a day. Previously, such a task would take longer, around three to four days.

The customizable dashboard provides the core information we need at a glance, such as the number of devices, locations, and network details. Additionally, it allows for drill-down functionality into specific devices, offering detailed information about the operating system, users on the device, and other relevant details.

Integrating networks with our current IT infrastructure system was very easy. Zabbix uses a MySQL database, and since our team has significant skills in MySQL, we were able to pick it up and start using it with no problems at all.

In the next release, I'm hoping for features targeted towards larger users with more customizable options. Despite this, I think pre-canned reports that can be used straight out of the box would be beneficial rather than having to configure each report individually. Additionally, a deeper dive into software configurations on the machines would be useful, although I understand there may be challenges in implementing this due to scripting requirements. More documentation would also be appreciated.

I have been working with the product for two years. 

The stability is really good. It seems lightweight and doesn't interfere with other processes running on the machine. As far as I can tell, none of our users have returned to me with any issues regarding the tool.

My company has 150-200 users. We've scaled from zero to over 200 devices, and I believe our Ubuntu server and VM can handle further scaling by increasing the computing power. While we haven't tested it extensively, I'm confident it has good scalability. We do have plans to increase the number of network users. I intend to add another hundred users, but they will be from remote sites. My next project will involve exploring whether Zabbix can operate across virtual private networks

I need to go to other remote buildings, check our network, and retrieve usage data from all devices in those locations. This is something we haven't done before.

I believe the team contacted the technical team for assistance during some initial configurations. The responses were timely and helpful. I don't recall if it was through calls, but I think it was mostly via email or chat. 

Our deployment took about ten days, including setting up different servers. If we had to install agents on all machines manually, it would have taken us much longer, possibly turning into a three—to four-month project. Additionally, the system is easily updateable, allowing us to patch the agent and incorporate new monitoring components as needed.

The tool's licensing is good. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. I recommend people start using it and dive into it. You'll see value almost immediately.

Our company is a financial organization and we use the solution to check connectivity, CPU utilization, and hard disk utilization for all of our servers. We monitor networks to learn traffic conditions. We use threshold features to compare servers or routers and find each server's size before it reaches 100%. 

The solution is currently installed in our IT division. We have 6,000 employees, 50 divisions, and 500 servers. The solution monitors all firewalls including HCI, Check Point, Palo Alto, Cisco, and VMware. 

The solution allows you to configure and customize how you want to collect information from servers or other systems. There are many options for any type of customization such as for servers, health checks, and traffic conditions. 

The solution needs to add features for finding loopholes or problems and their root causes. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

We have not yet purchased the commercial version so have a lack of technical ability. We do not yet fully know the key points or key features of the solution. We just use what we use along with WhatsUp Gold. 

Based on our use only, stability is rated a seven out of ten. 

The solution is definitely scalable and you get those benefits with the commercial version. We are using the freeware version right now but plan to purchase or get the premium support from the OEM.

Technical support is not provided with the freeware version so we don't have any support activity with the OEM. 

Another team member handles setup but it is not complicated. 

We implement the solution in-house. First, we install the solution on a VM. Later,  we manage the server and and install the VM there. 

The solution is open source so it is free.

We also have been using WhatsUp Gold for ten years. Zappix is a Linux solution and WhatsUp Gold is a Windows solution. 

We have a basic license for WhatsUp Gold and have purchased upgrades. In our country, there is no local expert tied with the OEM. The support team that is provided is not acceptable to us. 

The solutions, SolarWinds and WhatsUp Gold, are good for monitoring servers but lack the functionality to find problems or root causes for any system, application, or service. 

ThousandEyes and AppDynamics find actual problems with networks, applications, or services. We are looking more at these products because our goal is to find all loopholes. 

For example, the solution or WhatsUp Gold might identify a packet loss. But ThousandEyes or AppDynamics will drill to the highest problem such as the HTML or a Cisco network problem. This approach is much more interesting. 

The solution is popular in any IT sector because it allows for any number of customizations. 

Since we are using the freeware version, we do not know of other key features or how to use them. It is not necessarily the solution, but maybe instead our lack of knowledge. 

Based on our use, the solution is rated a seven out of ten. 

I used Zabbix for transaction monitoring.

Zabbix is good for discovery.

I had problems using Zabbix when working with SUSE Enterprise; many companies use SUSE.

I have used Zabbix for eight years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability depends on the infrastructure and different contexts, including security.

I have seen strict security contexts, and scaling the solution required creating multiple Zabbix servers. The solution is not easy to scale with multiple networks and sites.

Eight to nine people are using Zabbix in our organization.

I previously used Nagios before Zabbix and switched because Nagios required more clicks for monitoring. There is a lot of work when working with Nagios because it needs much maintenance. It was a large deployment, and I didn't have templates or standards for the kinds of hosts required.

The initial setup is very easy. It takes one day to install and deploy the solution when done very well with the right parameters. Two people are required for deployment. And since maintenance is easy, it requires one person. However, the number of people needed to maintain the solution depends on how large the setup is.

Support for Zabbix is a little expensive. Support is probably for large companies. If you have 20,000 hosts, the support costs around €95,000 for a year.

I never used technical support and relied on documentation and the community instead. The documentation was good. Zabbix is a good choice if you have a good team on Linux and a good team in general because the support is expensive for Zabbix.

If you're planning to choose Zabbix, start with a small deployment for the first five years. I rate Zabbix a nine out of ten.

I use Zabbix for monitoring. For example, monitoring networks and applications.

The solution has been proactive in altering while monitoring which has been helpful.

The most valuable features of Zabbix are flexibility and a single interface for different types of monitoring.

Zabbix could improve when it comes to large-scale use cases. Additionally, the inventory could be better when connecting to other solutions, such as ServiceNow. There show to be better integration with other platforms and storage.

In the solution's next release, customizing scripts could be easier and API interactions could be better. If they would allow larger data metrics on one chart would be helpful.

I have been using Zabbix for approximately four years.

The stability of Zabbix has been good.

We have approximately 300 network devices being monitored, including data center monitoring. Additionally, we monitor servers by different performance metrics and services.

Old versions of the solution do not scale well. We only had one master server and we had to switch off and turn on other features to allow scalability. It was not easy.

I have not used any support for the solution.

The initial setup of Zabbix is of a medium level of difficulty. The documentation is beneficial.

For a middle-sized integration of the solution of approximately 100 hosts, it can take one to two months to do all the necessary layers.

This solution is open-source and free to use.

The solution has quick integration, templating, mapping, and monitoring.

I rate Zabbix a seven out of ten.

I'm using it to have a global map overview of all my machines. We also use it in simple scenarios to check that our applications are up. We haven't really created that many dashboards at this time, but our next mission is to create good dashboards to efficiently track the VM performance.

There is a problems page that shows us every warning or problem that occurs on our VMs globally. The map screen is also really useful because this is something that was missing. I don't know every other tool in the market. So, I don't know if this is a good point of only Zabbix, or other tools are also doing it, but from my point of view, this is the most useful page that I use, along with the problems page that efficiently lists the problem, recovery time, ending hours, starting hours, and so on.

In terms of user-friendliness, large maps could be more interactive. We should be able to click on some areas and move some objects. It would make it simpler to see things while analyzing some dedicated parameters.

It has been six months.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have 15 to 20 users of this solution. It is used by the IT department. So, the operations teams, which is my team, and the system admin team, which is in charge of the infrastructure and the network, are its users.

I have never contacted them.

We used Centreon previously.

I was not a part of the deployment project, but I didn't hear that the deployment was complicated. The tool is very detailed, and maybe the configuration needed afterward to do the setup everywhere might be heavy.

From a user's perspective, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I use Zabbix to monitor my server and network infrastructure. It was set up to monitor cloud interfaces and ensure high-speed performance. The dashboards allow the support team to see interface status and are configured with porting.

The template system in Zabbix is very beneficial as it saves time in configuration. Initially, setting it up might seem challenging, but using pre-made templates makes integration with switches easier. By leveraging templates, configuration becomes more straightforward and efficient.

To improve Zabbix, adding more features to support the monitoring of modern workloads like containers would be beneficial. Many environments are shifting away from traditional setups to remote and customized infrastructures. Enhancing Zabbix to accommodate these changes would make it more appealing and user-friendly. This would help organizations like mine in selecting the most suitable monitoring solution.

I have been using Zabbix for about four years.

Zabbix is a highly stable solution. Despite occasional minor issues, it consistently delivers on its core features.

Zabbix offers good scalability and flexibility, although there have been some issues with database scalability over time. Configurability is straightforward but sometimes requires separating the database from the Zabbix virtual machine for easier management. Improvements in database scalability would enhance the overall scalability of Zabbix.

I would rate the technical support as an eight out of ten. It is quite good.

Positive

Zabbix is good for monitoring networks, while Prometheus is better for modern workloads like containers. Choosing depends on what you need to monitor. For diverse infrastructures, it is tough to pick one. Cost and engineer feedback help decide.

The initial setup of Zabbix was complex because of the need to customize it for our environment. It was challenging to integrate with our devices until we found templates to help with configuration. It took around two to three months to deploy the solution completely due to configuring many dashboards and integrating switches. Initially, it required two engineers to deploy and maintain, alongside support staff for ongoing operations.

Zabbix's licensing and pricing are good for our needs.

Zabbix helps manage application performance by providing easy-to-manage job reports and configuring alerts for network issues. It reduces turnaround time for issue resolution by 70%-80%. Managers and support teams receive updates on interface status, leading to quicker escalation and resolution. Zabbix also generates reports and dashboards showing link availability and downtime records, facilitating customer reporting and making processes more efficient.

The alerting and notification system in Zabbix is highly effective. It ensures that we are notified only when necessary, reducing unnecessary monitoring. Email alerts enable us to quickly respond to issues, even when away from the dashboard. This subscription system has significantly improved our response time to link failures.

Before using Zabbix, ensure that your database setup is appropriate for your environment, especially for larger setups. Consider hosting your database separately for security and performance reasons. Utilize templates provided by Zabbix to simplify the setup process, as they can streamline infrastructure configuration.

Overall, I would rate Zabbix as a nine out of ten. It is a great tool.

We primarily use it for monitoring, but also for some other things.

In terms of customization and integration, we have more flexibility. We can automate configurations, define deletion rules, and customize based on your needs. The client interface allows for further configuration, making it quite comprehensive.

Architecturally, we can even extend to the cloud using Suncoast servers and proxy servers to communicate with WorkRock or the supervisor. The compatible database list makes configuration straightforward.

User-friendliness is another strong point. We have a customizable dashboard. We can define metrics directly in the web portal, avoiding editing configuration files. This provides several advantages, especially when managing multiple collections.

There are areas of improvement. The database grows really fast. So, when you install Zabbix, you have to deal with some issues, like the database. We become pretty big very fast. 

This leads to optimization challenges, requiring manual deletion of network components like SNMP. We should work with SNMP. It's not as simple as configuring the host incident.

Configuration can also be difficult. The use of a workflow in the configuration of items or triggers makes it difficult to use an item in a mature way. It's hard to set up a dynamic workflow. While workflows exist, setting them up for specific data sources like network items can be a hurdle. You may need to find alternative methods, which isn't ideal.

For some customers, there are some personal customization challenges. But, for me, it's okay.

I have been using this solution for a year. We use version 6.0, which is the next recommended version. We don't do long-term tests, so it is a middle version.

The latest long-term support version we're using is 6.1.0.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

There are around less than 20 end users in the company. These include admins, managers, and engineers. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

I work with the public community like a public forum. So, when I have a request, I use the public community forums. We usually find solutions within a day or two, depending on availability.

Neutral

There are many options available. Today, you can use alternatives that provide better-detailed information. For instance, we have alerts concerning specific issues. I'm using Azure as part of this organizational setup. 

In Zabbix, for metrics, the latest release is better, and we can also find some metrics. Essentially, we don't incur any cost of the same magnitude. In Zabbix, images allow us to view the bot system today for Windows, Linux, infrastructure, and networking processes.

The installation itself took about one to two hours. The lack of clear step-by-step procedures. There are procedures, but they're not very detailed or user-friendly.

There is a team of admins to supervise the product. 

Zabbix itself is free, but professional support is paid. They have different pricing tiers based on the category and enterprise level. You can find the detailed pricing policy on their website.

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