The Customizability of Zabbix is Awesome
July 24, 2018

The Customizability of Zabbix is Awesome

Eric O'Callaghan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zabbix

While working at the Comcast headquarters as a Linux Engineer on their Splunk team, I set up Zabbix to monitor approximately one-thousand (1,000) physical servers running Splunk. It allowed us deeper insight into the use and performance of Splunk throughout our infrastructure. It also gave us the ability to prevent small problems (such as hard drive failures) from growing unchecked and leading to serious outages.

Pros

  • Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
  • Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
  • Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software

Cons

  • The first time that you use Zabbix, it may not be immediately obvious where everything is or how to find exactly what you want, but I think that it's UI is constantly improving with each new release. Training is also a great resource to resolve these types of problems.
  • While Zabbix allows in-depth customization of alerts to various applications (such as Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, or even SMS, etc.), I would love to see these options as built-in upon installation.
  • I have personally never found the "Maps" feature of Zabbix incredibly useful as I find it complicated to configure, but I should probably investigate its documentation further.
  • Zabbix simply makes it easier to identify, and subsequently resolve problems quickly
  • Zabbix gives one web page to look at to see a list of all on-going issue in a single place
  • Zabbix can automate response to alerts. For example, Zabbix allows you the customization to take a monitored server out of production rotation if it is identified as unhealthy
I personally prefer Zabbix over any other monitoring software that I have ever tried. Zabbix is so customizable that if there is a feature I need, I can easily implement it. I can then add that feature to a template in no time and have it applied to hundreds, or even thousands, of other servers. The performance of Zabbix and its ability to use proxy servers to gather data and report back to a primary node is also rather unique in my experience. Zabbix, being self-hosted, rather than a cloud solution, also prevents latency or routing issues from generating false alerts.
Nginx, Zend PHP Engine, GitHub, Highcharts, MySQL, Sequel Pro, Namecheap
Zabbix is a great solution when monitoring a majority of Linux servers, in my experience. I have never personally used it with Microsoft Windows servers and I'm not sure that I would recommend doing so based on my lack of familiarity with doing so.

In any case, I find Zabbix incredibly useful if you want a clean UI that lets you monitor absolutely anything that you could possibly imagine. The ability to set up "Templates" and "UserParameter"s within Zabbix are easily my favorite features.

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