Zabbix Information Reviews & Insights

Score8.7 out of 10

182 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Zabbix are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Recommendations

Users of Zabbix have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the open-source monitoring tool.

Many reviewers suggest setting up a separate virtual server for Zabbix to facilitate an easy installation and configuration process. This approach allows for better manageability and flexibility in integrating Zabbix into existing infrastructure.

Zabbix is highly recommended for its ability to provide customizable alerts and monitoring capabilities. Users appreciate the flexibility to tailor notifications according to their specific requirements, allowing them to stay informed about critical events and issues.

Several users recommend Zabbix specifically for network performance monitoring. They find it suitable for large-scale environments, making it an ideal choice for big companies that need to monitor metrics across tens of thousands of devices.

While many users find Zabbix to be a valuable monitoring tool, some have also noted a few considerations. It has been mentioned by some reviewers that Zabbix may not be very intuitive and can be challenging to set up initially. To overcome this hurdle, users advise seeking support from the Zabbix IRC channel or having a Linux administrator assist with the server setup.

A few users have observed that Zabbix can be resource hungry compared to other monitoring solutions like Nagios. They mention that tuning and optimizing Zabbix may require additional effort to achieve optimal performance.

Overall, reviewers recommend conducting due diligence and planning ahead before implementing Zabbix. While it may require some initial investment in terms of time and resources, users find that Zabbix offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities and steadily improves its user interface over time. For smaller businesses or those utilizing virtual machines, reviewers suggest giving Zabbix a try as it can be deployed effectively in such environments.

Reviews

12 Reviews

Information

"The network guardian, excellent product."

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 24, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zabbix in our company for the control and monitoring of each of the Gigabit Ethernet interfaces of the transport network, based on the premise that our network is a ring topology, we have distributed probes at strategic points that allow us to collect real and timely data on the status and behavior of each interface, On the other hand and not less important it facilitates the verification and monitoring of the BGP sessions with our international provider, a fundamental aspect since it depends on them that we can offer the service to our customers, we use it only in our department and with zabbix we can perform routine tasks such as backup, alarms and automatic monitoring quickly and effectively.

Pros

Easy to configure.
Centralized monitoring.
Web-based interface.
Flexible.
Distributed control system.
Secure user authentication.
Supports different operating systems.

Cons

I think some work should be done on the interface to change its appearance and organization to create a more pleasant experience.
It would be very useful to have more resources in documentation to perform certain processes on the tool, which would help to cover a better development.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is ideal for companies of any size, thanks to its flexibility and scalability, it is also very adaptable to different environments, it is very suitable for monitoring the availability and performance of industrial equipment, services and network hardware simultaneously and in real time, to control the resources available on the network, to centralize heterogeneous networks among others, it also facilitates its modification and design to be fully open source.

Armando Gomez Alarcon

Analista in Information Technology at EMCALI - Telecomunicaciones (Telecommunications, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

Please see this Zabby review of Zabbix.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 5, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We monitor Virtual network functions (VNFs) alarms & performance graphs on Zabbix. It is basically an FM & PM system that collects data from all the nodes & aggregates them in the form of user-readable graphs & XL sheets. It is also used to set performance-based alerts in the system & it can also be used as an aggregator for a big NMS type system like Nokia's NetAct.

Pros

Alarm monitoring.
Performance graphs.
Creation of new alerts - either fault based or performance based.

Cons

Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.

Asad Khan

Technical CARE Specialist in Engineering at Nokia (Telecommunications, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

A powerful, customizable and flexible monitoring tool

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 15, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Zabbix to monitor our infrastructure, network, services and applications.

Pros

Flexible, can be customized to fit pretty much any use case
Multi-tenancy support, allows different teams and customers to be granted controlled access to host groups, dashboards and UI sections
Automatic discovery of hosts and host items
Highly customizable dashboards, maps, graphs and out of box templates
Powerful alerting
Availability of a well formatted official documentation that has the basic stuff
Powerful API for integration with other systems
Friendly user community, very important for FOSS
Clear and open roadmap

Cons

The official documentation isn't too friendly for first timers
Requires considerable knowledge of Operating Systems, Database and PHP tuning.

Likelihood to Recommend

Since it is highly customizable and flexible, Zabbix can fit most use cases.

Faustine Chisasa

Network Engineer in Engineering at Tanzania Telecommunications Corporation (Telecommunications, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Zabbix a good solution if you have the time to dive in.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

December 5, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zabbix is currently one of our main monitoring applications (next to Munin). It is used to monitor the state of hardware (temperatures, hardware-errors), the state of the operating system (running, load, memory usage, etc.) and the state of services (running, network-connections, load, etc.). Additionally, some services can report on further metrics, e.g. if files are outdated or show unreasonable behavior. Through the trigger-framework, we can start automated mitigation, as well as manually inspect the issue.

Pros

History graphs show long-term trends, but still allow you to dig down to the minute.
Custom dashboards allow for teams to only monitor what's relevant for them.
The trigger-framework is pretty mighty and can act on a lot of metrics. This makes it also sometimes hard to comprehend.

Cons

Setting up items, triggers, hosts, classes, etc. is first tedious, secondly not very obvious.
Auto-discovery can get tricky if you don't have the correct configuration bits.
Overall the UI is functional, but not necessarily pretty.

Likelihood to Recommend

For large organizations with a team around monitoring, it is a very practical tool to manage your infrastructure. It allows autoconfiguration/autodiscovery of hosts and metrics. When you think of monitoring a single host, or just a few, there are other tools out there that may be easier to set-up; thinking for example of net-data.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Telecommunications company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Best FOSS software for monitoring

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

June 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zabbix is primarily being used to monitor servers and services running on them, though it is starting to be used also to monitor network components as well. Secondarily, it is being used as a Synthetic User Monitor for web applications.

Pros

Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.

Cons

Zabbix is very complex and the documentation, while complete, is not particularly well organized. In particular, I would like to see step by step instructions (similar to the synthetic user monitoring example) for installation and setup; more about what some of the numbers mean; etc.
Zabbix system requirements are artificially high to cover every possibility, yet rarely are those resources used. Would like to see segmented resource requirements based on the size of monitoring to more efficiently size an environment.
Zabbix has some nasty "gotya's" that are not really addressed in the documentation. For example, when first setting up an environment, there is nothing discussing the order of setup (host group, then users, then host, for example); but doing it in the wrong order will make it much more difficult to use later on. A tutorial (or series of tutorials) setting up the first several devices would go a long way here.
Not so much a con as an UGLY that is common to most of this class of software - Zabbix requires a great deal of detailed understanding across several different IT disciplines. DBA knowledge for maintaining the database, System Administration for setting up and maintaining the server(s) and its software, Networking for setting up monitoring of the network, each software package you will have synthetic monitors of, etc. In most larger organizations, that means a lot of collaboration, but in smaller organizations, where it may only be a single person or team doing all the work, it means someone must be deeply knowledgeable about each aspect being monitored. It is no longer enough to just know the OS it is running on and leaving it to the user to know the software, or the network team to deal with the network issues.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is probably the best classical monitoring software out there that is also FOSS. It is superior to Nagios and other similar software from implementation to utilization, and equal in capabilities. It is equally capable to SolarWinds (and competitors), and more expandable (thanks to the support of user-generated XML templates), but at the cost of time, knowledge, and effort. It serves a different market than pure cloud monitoring solutions, though they do overlap heavily, so it probably is not as well suited to cloud-only monitoring (though it can be set up to work effectively in this role as well). However, given the flexibility of on-prem monitoring as well, it can be an option in conjunction with, or in place of the cloud-only monitoring if that is a need.

Overall, I would put Zabbix on par with SolarWinds and the main differentiator is where are the costs going to be paid - in end-user training and support of Zabbix or in the commercial, ease of use provided by SolarWinds (and competitors).

Thomas Higgins

Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at Matthews International (Internet, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Reliable monitoring for a perfect profile of your network assets and connections.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zabbix to monitor network assets and customer links to generate reports and resolve potential problems in its infrastructure.

Pros

Monitor connection availability.
Monitor network assets.
Generate reports on the performance of network assets.
Generate reports on the performance of customer connections.

Cons

Increase the number of configurable triggers.
Clean the interface a little more.
Leave the operation a little lighter.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is best suited for environments with computers running Windows (for the web interface) and where constant monitoring of assets and network connections is required.

Ricardo Melo

Network Analyst in Information Technology at Aloo Telecom (Telecommunications, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Zabbix Power Users

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 25, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zabbix to monitor both the internal IT Infrastructure, as well as the external IT Infrastructure. It was first implemented in 2010 and it has evolved significantly over the years, giving us a single pane of glass for monitoring systems, storage, network and the applications themselves. By implementing a solution that provides us this level of visibility, Engineers only have a single place to look to find the root cause of an issue, rather than jumping from system to system, trying to correlate events.
Zabbix is heavily used by Systems, Network and Database Engineers as well as Applications Developers to provide visibility to what is happening in the environment, to notice a problem before our users do.
We have implemented Zabbix so that there is a central Zabbix server (hosted in AWS), with Zabbix proxies at each physical location where there is infrastructure. This way if the Zabbix server goes down, no data is lost, as it is cached on each of the proxies until connectivity is restored to the Zabbix server.

Pros

Zabbix is able to provide us a single pane of glass for monitoring. It can handle Systems, Database, Network and application level alerts and send those alerts to the appropriate parties.
Zabbix graphs all metrics that come in. This means it's easy to spot trends and create alerts based on when those trends cross user-defined thresholds.
Zabbix allows for the escalation of issues. If someone sleeps through an alert in the middle of the night, it can easily be escalated to the next tier.

Cons

In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts.
Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable.
This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is well suited in an environment where connectivity is possible between all hosts in the network. Zabbix agents need to be able to "phone home" to the Zabbix server or a proxy. If connectivity is not possible between the agent and the server (typically the server is going to live in the "trust" section of the network, rather than a DMZ), Zabbix may not be a good fit. Zabbix is also appropriate in a cross-platform environment.
Zabbix is also highly appropriate in shops that are interested in building their own monitoring infrastructure, rather than using a service. These services are obviously not free, but the time that you invest in Zabbix may make up for that monthly spend.

Verified User

Director in Information Technology (Internet company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Big fans of Large-Scale Zabbix for a decade

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 25, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are big fans of Zabbix and use it as our core monitoring system for our Chinese MSP business, monitoring thousands of hosts for hundreds of customers across dozens of locations, data centers, and cloud. We've customized it with some UI enhancements, API additions, and DB integrations into ticket and service systems, too.

Pros

Template system is really great, making it super easy to add new services and monitoring, graphs, etc. to any server.
Security system is very useful for multiple teams, groups, and customers.
Very flexible data gathering on a wide variety of protocols.

Cons

UI is getting updated, but still dated a bit.
Doesn't easily accept unsolicited data like Datadog, Prometheus, etc. can. Everything has to be pre-configured or discovered, making it hard to just send it metrics from code.
Integration with AWS, Docker, Java, etc. is via 3rd parties or outside tools, so while the agent is great, it needs more reach.

Likelihood to Recommend

Very well suited to traditional IT and Internet monitoring, with servers, VMs, databases, etc.

Less-suited to highly dynamic environments, heavily in the cloud, with serverless, Docker, Lambda, etc.

Steve Mushero

CEO in Information Technology at OpsStack (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Fantastic OpenSource alternative to Nagios! Much cheaper than SaaS alternatives.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 24, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zabbix organization-wide to monitor several environments in AWS. Use of the Zabbix proxy allows us to manage many environments from a centralized location. We can graph and alert on all separate environments in a monolithic fashion. Zabbix's new trending and forecasting allow us to model performance based on trends in each environment.

Pros

Allows for centralized monitoring of many separated environments.
Out-of-the box templates for many operating systems.
Auto discovery and confirmation allows new environments to be added quickly and easily.

Cons

The web frontend isn't always intuitive, can be hard to find things that you know you saw somewhere!
Zabbix expressions require somewhat of a steep learning curve.
Documentation not always as complete as it could be for some options.

Likelihood to Recommend

Larger environments that are spread across different networks and physicalities play well with Zabbix with the use of Zabbix Proxy. It isn't very useful in things like AWS AutoScaled environments as IP addresses of the nodes constantly change and there's no good way to maintain the ephemeral nature of that type of environment in Zabbix.

Josh Quint

Lead AWS Systems Architect in Information Technology at Turing Group (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Zabbix is Overall a good tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 12, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's used across the whole organization. It's used to monitor the server parameters, application URLs, logs etc.

Pros

Server monitoring
URL availability
We write custom application monitoring scripts and send the data to Zabbix.

Cons

Ability to authenticate to a webpage and monitor, just like keynote.
The web scenarios doesn't work well with REST end points. No feature to read the response header.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zabbix is a good monitoring tool for servers and availability, but it needs to be used with other tools to achieve the required monitoring. There are some lacking features like browser synthetic monitoring, application performance monitoring etc..but overall it's good.

Nishanthi Mohan

DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at FICO (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Loading Reviews List....

Best FOSS software for monitoring

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

June 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.

Cons

Zabbix is very complex and the documentation, while complete, is not particularly well organized. In particular, I would like to see step by step instructions (similar to the synthetic user monitoring example) for installation and setup; more about what some of the numbers mean; etc.
Zabbix system requirements are artificially high to cover every possibility, yet rarely are those resources used. Would like to see segmented resource requirements based on the size of monitoring to more efficiently size an environment.
Zabbix has some nasty "gotya's" that are not really addressed in the documentation. For example, when first setting up an environment, there is nothing discussing the order of setup (host group, then users, then host, for example); but doing it in the wrong order will make it much more difficult to use later on. A tutorial (or series of tutorials) setting up the first several devices would go a long way here.
Not so much a con as an UGLY that is common to most of this class of software - Zabbix requires a great deal of detailed understanding across several different IT disciplines. DBA knowledge for maintaining the database, System Administration for setting up and maintaining the server(s) and its software, Networking for setting up monitoring of the network, each software package you will have synthetic monitors of, etc. In most larger organizations, that means a lot of collaboration, but in smaller organizations, where it may only be a single person or team doing all the work, it means someone must be deeply knowledgeable about each aspect being monitored. It is no longer enough to just know the OS it is running on and leaving it to the user to know the software, or the network team to deal with the network issues.

Likelihood to Recommend

Thomas Higgins

Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at Matthews International (Internet, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile