Zabbix

Zabbix is open-source infrastructure and network monitoring software that IT departments and MSPs self-host or run as the managed Zabbix Cloud.

Zabbix collects readings from servers, network devices, cloud services and applications, and opens a problem when a reading breaks a trigger rule. It brings checks that teams often scatter across scripts and separate tools into one server and one web interface. Zabbix LLC, the company behind it, has developed the software since 2005. The source code is open, and the platform runs on a team's own servers or as the managed Zabbix Cloud. Data arrives through Zabbix agent 2, SNMP polling, the HTTP agent, IPMI and JMX checks. The Zabbix trapper accepts values pushed by scripts, and the JSON-RPC API can push them too. Network discovery scans IP ranges for new devices, while low-level discovery creates items for the interfaces it finds on each host. Zabbix proxies gather data at remote sites and forward it to the central server. Baseline trigger functions compare a metric with the same period in earlier seasons, and webhook media types carry alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Opsgenie and PagerDuty. Operations and network teams with a mixed estate of physical servers, virtual machines, cloud accounts and switches are the core users. Managed service providers rely on its multi-tenant user groups and permissions to keep each customer's hosts and dashboards apart. Organisations with strict data rules can install the whole product, server and web frontend included, inside their own network. Companies that want response commitments from Zabbix add a support subscription, and teams that do not want to operate the server choose Zabbix Cloud. A typical deployment polls switches and routers over SNMP, watches servers through agents and reads AWS, Azure and Google Cloud metrics through templates that need no agent. Kubernetes clusters are covered by a template set that discovers pods and reads kubelet data. Dashboards combine widgets such as Honeycomb, Geomap and the SLA report, and scheduled reports go out to customers on a set timetable. Host inventory records each device's model and serial number, which helps when a failing switch has to be traced. For teams monitoring many sites or many customers, Zabbix keeps every check, alert and report in one place.