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Zabbix

Score8.7 out of 10

182 Reviews and Ratings

What is Zabbix?

Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.

Easy to customize and monitor.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We started to feel the need of a network monitoring tool few years back when one of our secondary core network connectivity with a partner got down somehow and we had no visibility over it until the next routine network check which was 24hours later! Secondary lines are our first line of defense if the primary one goes down, so we were at a great risk but as had no idea at all! so after going through some of the renowned monitoring tool we decided to go with Zabbix as it seemed well equipped with the features that we were looking for. Since then we are using Zabbix along with some other NMS to monitor our connectivity with most our valuable of partners. Zabbix is quite easy to deploy and manage and helps us tom easily identify if anything goes down or offline.

Pros

  • Zabbix can collect metrics from various sources. We have diffrent vendors firewall, router & switches and till now we did not face any issues while monitoring these devices.
  • It's very easy to deploy and moreover the monitoring dashboard is pretty simple to use and customize. We have customized the dashboard to highlight the core connectivity only and it helps us to monitor more efficiently.
  • The alerting system is my favorite part to be honest. We don't have to sit all day in front of the screen to monitor the networks. We get notifications through SMS which helps all of our team members to get aligned when anything goes down.
  • The widgets are highly customizable which helps us to monitor the important lines

Cons

  • Zabbix is a great tool and highly customizable, but the issue is most of the customization has to be done by the administrator which is not preferrable by all. I myself was not much happy with all the manual things at the beginning but gradually i liked it.
  • I have no complain about the dashboard but compared to the modern NMS, Zabbix feels bit backdated. I would suggest improving the dashboard UI as well.

Return on Investment

  • Investing in tools like Zabbix is always positive as it saves us from losing money or putting the organization at risk by not having proper visibility over the organizations network and system.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM) and SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Other Software Used

SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM), SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Eagle eye on your entire infrastructure with Zabbix.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zabbix as a monitoring tool for our entire infrastructure. We monitor network appliances, servers, firewalls, Internet lines, and bandwidth. We also use it to draw maps of the network connect interfaces and monitor these endpoints in case of a failed link or hardware failure. Before Zabbix, we were wasting a lot of time logging into each device and checking the network status, but after Zabbix, we now have one dashboard to monitor all traffic and appliances.

Pros

  • Inventory of network appliances.
  • Monitoring traffic and bandwidth usage.
  • Drawing network maps and connecting interfaces.

Cons

  • Monitoring hardware status needs to be improved to avoid problems before they happen.
  • It needs to be powered by AI to expect problems before it happens.
  • UI could use a lot of improvements for reading alerts and drawing maps.

Return on Investment

  • Saving cost and money waste when using avoiding system interruption because of the alert system.
  • Saving system engineer time of spending hours logging to server and Zabbix is presenting all hardware's in main dashboard.
  • We saved the cost of 3 Helpdesk staff and added Zabbix to monitor and send alerts thru emails to the engineers 24/7.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

PRTG Network Monitor and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

Other Software Used

PRTG Network Monitor, SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM), NetCrunch by AdRem Software

Great monitoring tool for free.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We work for a non-profit organization with around 1500 devices spread over several locations. Zabbix is monitoring a lot of these devices. It can check for hardware, ping, status, and other things. Zabbix also sends notifications via emails, sms, Telegram, and more. It can also run scripts. It gives us eyes when we don't have our people.

Pros

  • Notification
  • Visibility
  • Availability
  • Flexibility

Cons

  • Adding new kind of hardware.
  • First installation.
  • Takes time to master it.

Return on Investment

  • Requires small amount of resources.
  • Its open source - free.
  • Saves as the need to hire people on remote sites.

Usability

"The network guardian, excellent product."

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<div>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.</div><div>

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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.

Most Important Features

  • Open source.
  • Distributed monitoring.
  • Effectiveness for problem detection.
  • Visualization functions.
  • Performance for data collection.

Return on Investment

  • Decrease in the times established for the solution of network failures, which allowed us to provide our telecommunications services in a short period of time.
  • Increased competitiveness and a considerable decrease in the rates of desertion due to bad service.

Other Software Used

Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), Microsoft Teams

Please see this Zabby review of Zabbix.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We monitor Virtual network functions (VNFs) alarms &amp; performance graphs on Zabbix. It is basically an FM &amp; PM system that collects data from all the nodes &amp; aggregates them in the form of user-readable graphs &amp; XL sheets. It is also used to set performance-based alerts in the system &amp; 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.

Most Important Features

  • Alarm monitoring.
  • SNMP traps towards NMS.
  • Performance graphs.

Return on Investment

  • reduced the fault-finding time by 50% compared to manual command-based health checks.
  • Reduced the identification of performance glitches by 80% compared to manual SAR analysis.
  • Alarms can be easily exported to any other NMS using SNMP traps.

Alternatives Considered

Prometheus, Grafana and Logstash

Other Software Used

Prometheus, Grafana, Logstash