Is Zabbix the right choice for me?

[Ibrahim]

Hi everbody,
I have been asked in my organization to find a soluation monitor our system under a performance test. The tool to be used is supposed to give real time system data such as: CPU util, memory util, disk util, processes, queues, database size, alarms, dump cores, network interfaces, etc. The monitoring is supposed to be done while out cluster system is under load testing. This means that the monitoring tool should have the least impact on the system to assure accuracy of our tests.
Among the tools I am evaluating is Zabbix. I have installed and configuered this tool last week: a server on Linux ER 4, and two agents on Linux and HPUX. I am quite satisfied with what I have seen. This tool seems to be extendable, easy to setup, has a good web interface, gives notifications and makes some actions.
What I would love to know is wether anybody has tested this tool with agents installed on very busy systems. How does the agents behave? how much memory and CPU they will consume?

I would also appreciate any feedback and suggestions.
Thanks
Ibrahim

[cybaspace]

We are running zabbix on about 150 hosts. We have about 1500 triggers and we use SNMP and zabbix agents for Linux and windows. The cpu / mem utilisation is verry low and we never had any problems with it.

The power of zabbix for us is that you can use your custom userparameters. This way you can use scripts to gather values. The agent sends these values back to the zabbix server. This way it's possible to monitor our batch processing for instance. You aren't bounded to the standard functionality that zabbix offers, but you can monitor whatever you like!

The things you mentioned is standard functionality so that shouldn't be a problem.

Zabbix is verry important for us right now. This piece of software is our eyes & ears!

Apart from some bugs we are verry satisfied with it and it can do things where others fail.