Opinion About zabbix

[beownd]

Hello,

For my project I need to examine what the opinion is of users of zabbix.
Can you post here what you think are the advantages and disadvantages of zabbix.

thank you for your help,

Tim

[qix]

Hi Tim!

I think Zabbix is terrific! I've been a happy user since 2006 (version 1.1.3).
It has it's obstacles, but once you're past that it is refreshingly flexible and will let you monitor almost anything you would want (it just takes a little effort).

I've made a small list of pros and cons from the top of my head to get you started:

Pros:

• Leanes heavilly on LAMP - relativly easy to get running (if you are experienced with this stuff, most are)
• SQL database and API open the door for 3rd party applications (like Zabcon or Crystal reports)
• trends and alerting in one solution (think MRTG + Nagios in one package)
• Very flexible, monitoring is exentable via various scripting methods (userparameters, external checks, zabbix_sender)
• Use of proxies and Distributed Monitoring allow a very complex and large setup
• You can use about anything for alert notification, as long as you can script it (for instance, I used to play different wav files depending on trigger severity on a workstation to alert me *Danger, danger Will Robinson!*)
• You *can* buy support if needed. Wiki, forum and irc are a big help

Cons:

• Tuning and tweaking can be a lot of work, but when done you'll love it
• Reporting is rather weak, no reporting export feature for example
• Requires a lot of resources compared to Cacti/Nagios, but it is way more versatile and dare I say, scalable (DM, proxies).
• Database can grow very large, very quickly if not tuned properly
• SNMP monitoring is a bit different compared to other poducts like cacti and it's not very resource friendly: a lot of connections will be made (firewalls could get problems with this, for real)
• It has a bit of a learning curve, but that is the price to pay for such a flexible solution
• It has a funny name (difficult to get a manager to take it serious, they prefer names like OpenView)

That should get you going
(btw, please feel free to comment)