What is Zabbix? Open-Source Server & Network Monitoring Tool

Zabbix is an open-source, primarily observability and performance monitoring tool that streamlines auditing of on-premises cloud services, IT components, and virtual machines.  The C- and PHP-based monitoring tool was developed by Alexei Vladishev (Founder & CEO, Zabbix LLC) in 2001. Prior to this software, enterprises were using expensive proprietary monitoring tools. Hence, Zabbix was introduced to track the performance and manage the endpoints of growing IT infrastructure.   

The article decodes the core features, functionalities, and pricing of the Zabbix monitoring tool. Furthermore, we will compare it with other tools before wrapping up. Read on.

What is the Zabbix Monitoring Tool?

The Zabbix monitoring tool tracks metrics for network usage like control panels (cPanel and Plesk) do in web hosting accounts. It collects, stores, processes, and visualizes data from servers, networks, virtual machines, and services. The open-source tool is compatible with Linux, Hewlett Packard Unix, Mac OS X, Solaris, and other operating systems (OSes). Zabbix supports different protocols:

• SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
• IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface)
• JMX (Java Management Extensions)
• SSH/Telnet
• Zabbix Agent and Agent2 (cross-platform)
• REST API for automation and integrations

Designed with higher-precision, Zabbix generates reports and shows metrics with minimal latency.

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What is Zabbix Used for?

The Zabbix tool has massive adoption across industries, including manufacturing, IT, and telecom. Here are defined use cases of this tool.

1. Server & Infrastructure Monitoring

Zabbix uses protocols and methods (SNMP, IPMI, SSH, HTTP, and Zabbix agent checks) to monitor a variety of different types of server. It monitors Docker and Kubernetes resources, including containers, nodes, and pods. Integrating Zabbix with VMware infrastructure automates monitoring on VMware guest machines, hypervisors, and data stores.

2. Network Monitoring (SNMP, devices)

Zabbix analyzes network traffic metrics on devices. It amalgamates link status, number of TCP connections, and other metrics such as bandwidth usage for delivering accurate results. Moreover, a built-in alert mechanism activates whenever Zabbix detects a network issue. Aggregating the calculated statistics over time makes it a user-friendly and trend-focused tool.  

3. Cloud & Container Monitoring

The container monitoring mechanism of the Zabbix monitoring tool discovers and monitors cloud instances (AWS, Azure, and GCP) and containerized environments (Kubernetes and Docker). It enhances remote operations by automating remediation processes that minimize downtime through the use of scripts. It centralizes all multi-cloud and container metrics in a custom dashboard.   

4. Application Performance Monitoring

The open-source platform excels in monitoring application performance through HTTP/HTTPS and Zabbix agent protocols. HTTP/HTTPS is used for synthetic monitoring, API endpoint availability, and directly fetching health metrics for application infrastructure. Agents/plugins installed on the server use Zabbix agents to obtain deep OS and resource metrics.

5. Website/Uptime Monitoring

The Zabbix tool uses ‘Web Scenarios’ to monitor website uptime. MilesWeb’s 360° Monitoring Solution uses the same mechanism to track your website’s uptime, ensuring a frictionless browsing experience for users. A Zabbix custom trigger notifies if your website slows down or experiences performance bottlenecks.

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Key Features of Zabbix

1. Metric Collection

Zabbix collects metrics from different sources:

• Network devices
• Cloud services, containers, virtual machines
• OS-level monitoring
• Log files
• Databases
• Applications
• Services
• IoT sensors

A hosting environment of Zabbix consists of a logical container that stores data, triggers output, and maps web scenarios. A server, a network switch, a container, a website, or a cloud API endpoint are all equally valid hosts. Along with the host, there is an item representing a single metric associated with it, which decides the Zabbix data collection.  

2. Problem Detection

Zabbix’s set of triggers uses logical statements to define the behavior of problems in the system. These triggers evaluate the metrics that are collected to determine whether problems have arisen. If a certain measured value, such as CPU load, exceeds a certain limit, the state of the trigger changes to “problem.” This generates a system event and starts the automatic notification and remote operation sequence, as well as updating a dashboard in the system.

3. Business Monitoring

With a focus on core metrics and business functions, Zabbix Business Service Monitoring (BSM) prioritizes business health over independent server evaluations. Unlike other service monitor tools, BSM models your infrastructure using a structured tree hierarchy to perform root-cause analysis. From there, it calculates service unavailability, measures the cost of downtime, and evaluates SLAs.

If a service is impacted by the failure of a backend database, BSM knows which high-level business services and systems (customer portal, checkout system, etc.) are impacted. This helps IT teams focus on the most critical issues, which are evident by their business impact.

4. Deployment

Zabbix is designed to be deployed and scaled on your on-premises, cloud, and containerized infrastructure. It employs stateless, lightweight Zabbix proxies to monitor dispersed network segments. Proxies cache metrics locally and facilitate safe, uncorrupted data transfer to the Zabbix server, even during downtime.

Its proxies help easily and rapidly deploy monitoring services. From a single office, Zabbix can be scaled to monitor all services from millions of endpoints worldwide.

5. Data Visualization

Intuitiveness and data visualization are prime USPs of Zabbix. It provides custom illustrations of performance metrics by offering flexible dashboards and custom report builders. Custom metrics, widgets, geo-maps, and user-defined topologies can be configured to monitor the health of your infrastructure.

Dashboards can be set up to show only the data that technical staff need to see for taking action, while stakeholders can see the business-related metrics they require on a schedule. They can be automated as PDFs to ensure that stakeholders see the data they need.

Is Zabbix Free?

Zabbix claims its open-source nature but charges a premium for enterprise and cloud infrastructure support. Zabbix offers fixed and custom billing plans that are based on response coverage, access and commitments. Paid plans support growing operations, unlimited deployments and critical IT infrastructure.

What does the free version of Zabbix include?

The open source version of Zabbix has all the enterprise features, no device limits, feature gating or licensing costs. It is available under open-source licenses: AGPLv3 for version 7.0 and later, and GPLv2 for older versions.

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How Does Zabbix Work?

It is a three-tier system that has a central server and lightweight agents and web interface for data collection, alerts and graphical dashboards.

Core Components and Architecture

• Zabbix-Server: The Zabbix architectural component that fetches data from agents, processes triggers and processes alerts.
• Zabbix Agent: A tiny piece of software that is installed on the monitored system (Windows, Linux, etc.) that actively polls local metrics (memory, CPU, etc.)
• Zabbix Frontend: Web based user interface for the real time display of graphs, maps and configured system parameters.
• Database: This is a relational database management system (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL) where all the configuration and historical performance metrics are stored.

Zabbix Alternatives: A Quick Comparison

– Nagios vs. Zabbix

The choice between Nagios and Zabbix will depend on the size of the infrastructure and the administration preference. Zabbix has built-in visualization capabilities, while Nagios is a lightweight and customizable monitoring solution.

– Zabbix vs. Grafana 

Zabbix and Grafana combined to collect, analyze and trigger alerts for metrics. Grafana provides the data visualization and dashboard layer and Zabbix does the heavy lifting backend monitoring and feeds the data to Grafana for slick, modern visualizations.

– Zabbix vs. Prometheus

Zabbix is a conventional monitoring suite built for servers, databases, and network devices. In contrast, Prometheus is a specialized, time-series database that is supportive to a cloud-native ecosystem, designed for Kubernetes and microservices.

– Zabbix vs. SolarWinds

Cost, setup cycles, and ecosystem are key differentiators of Zabbix and SolarWinds. Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool with restricted deployment features while SolarWinds is a commercial platform offering advanced deployment capabilities.