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**bbrendon** · 13-06-2007, 07:01

I've never heard of Zenoss, but I just looked at their website which looks very impressive, but the product looks very non-impressive.

I honestly haven't used a lot of the inexpensive solutions except for Zabbix. I did some research, and everything said to go with Zabbix so I did. Its a love hate thing at times. Mostly the hate being the quality of the code, but you learn to love it

I have used many expensive tools such as the Micromuse suite, HP Openview, BMC Patrol, SMARTS, and many more. These cost hundreds of thousands to millions and they are often shelfware/junk.

**Andreas Bollhalder** · 13-06-2007, 08:10

I like the existance of an agent for different os. Most NMS I have tested doesn't have an agent. Also the requirements of ZABBIX meet our needs an skills: Apache, PHP and MySQL on Linux.

Shure, ZABBIX too needs some improvments, but there is no NMS that can claim to be the golden egg.

Andreas

**Bharathu** · 13-06-2007, 13:17

Zabbix gave me sleepless nights to understand and install..... but i somehow loved the full challenge and I learnt a lot of things... I work in performance testing.. and zabbix looks to have a great potential in it.

**zabbix_es** · 13-06-2007, 13:37

zabbix tries to do what I expect of a good monitor.

Well, I think that zabbix tries to do what I expect of a good monitor.

I don't want to have severals monitoring tools, one for logs, other for graphics, other for SLA, other for tendencies, ...

But also I don´t want static tools that I could not improve with my own scripts.

For example, I also like ganglia, but it is only for graphics and it looks sttoped.

We only need improve zabbix reliability.

**dratliff** · 13-06-2007, 14:26

I can understand the problems with installation.

Are primary goal here was to monitor the transfer of an XML document (much more complex than it sounds) to it's endpoint at a county queue. We need to monitor success/failure, data issues, etc. As we started building this framework, we started seeing other uses for it. This product was used at a state level to monitor specific data-transfer functions. One of our coworkers had previous knowledge and experience with zabbix. So that is the route we took. I have also investigated Zenoss at the height of my frustration. The power of zabbix is that it is configurable on the client side to monitor whatever you want. I can write java/VB/Shell Scripts/SQL to monitor specific processes and output data. The possibilities are endless. Every product has that feature to a point, but the community support it really the underlying reason to stick with zabbix.

My only complaints are the documentation, the lack of internal support for winblows (yes, we have to use it mainly for our production software) and the previous update process to 1.4.

My compliments are to the developers for working very hard on the issues and having presence in the forums. Also the forums and the knowledge contained there in and the possibilities of the product. I love the fact that you can get data from the performance keys in windows...

It isn't a perfect product. But it has a dedicated development team and a great following.

**gaston** · 14-06-2007, 23:00

First I just want to say that I know "well" no other monitoring tools than Zabbix. I am in contact with nagios but I have not installed or customized it.

I use zabbix for my company on a gentoo. I am not sure to understand where are the troubles during the installation. That's one of the things I like with it : I had few troubles in installing Zabbix (version 1.1.6) and upgrading it to 1.4 . A bit more than half a day and everything was ok.

For the documentation, I have often found what I wanted. Perhaps could it be a bit more "full" about the items. As former developper, I know how hard it could be to write documentation...

The things I like very much with Zabbix is its ability to write a script on the agent into the programming language I like. This fact, as smart for everyone, offers also endless possiblities. I have almost everytime found a workaround to Zabbix leaks.

**bbrendon** · 16-04-2008, 19:44

Okay. I'm back in the love camp. I'm a 60's hippie, what can I say.

It has been working so well for the past few weeks. I'm in love again!

No worries though... I can feel the presence of great frustration in the future of 1.6.

... you can't be a hippie forever

**nelsonab** · 16-04-2008, 20:19

I've been playing with Zabbix for a few years and like Infinity, it's a love hate relationship. I love the program and what I can do with it. I *hate* the documentation. Yes that's a strong word. My biggest gripe has been the documentation is either too simple or too complex, there's no rampup for complex things like DM in the documentation. It basically says, this is how you setup DM.... Done... How about a discussion about how it works first, what it's meant for, what were the design goals? But there rarely is so when the documentation falls short I'm left scratching my head and diving through the code.

Overall for me the biggest strength is one echoed by others, flexibility. I can monitor just about anything with it, it's just a matter of figuring out how to put the data into Zabbix.

If I had to pick ONE feature I LOVE about Zabbix... Graphing. I love the granularity of the graphs. I have not seen this in Nagios or other packages until recently. I like that I can go back exactly one month from now and look at a period of three hours between 14:15 and 17:15 for any data which has been captured that long.

There are also many other really cool features that are less than documented unfortunately. For instance you can embed any graph from zabbix in another web page. All graph pages can be self contained and the header/footer can be turned off. There's also a permissions issue with this, but that's an "understood potential complication" ;-).

Overall give it a few weeks. You'll either love it and pimp it everywhere or you'll get it working and then never touch it unless it breaks.

**bbrendon** · 17-04-2008, 17:51

nelsonab: Yes the documentation sucks, but the forums pretty much take up the slack. In my opinion there is a bigger and more important issue... bugs and stability.

Is the source for the documentation available? Maybe some of us that don't read it could improve it.

**fableman** · 22-04-2008, 13:29

I love zabbix cos I easy include my own scripts to take out info from sql databases,webpages,switches,weather equippment and graph it, servers cpu load, network load and more and be able to connect alarms to it and much more and build different views for different peopel that log into zabbix.

And i really love that I monitor 6 servers and can combine there cpu load into 1 new graph to easy get a over view of the cpu's.

I even graph how many people thats move in/out/die/divorce/marrige/single's, kids,ages and soo on in the city I work for.

If zabbix cant do it you can easy make your ouw bash script todo it. All ya need is zabbix and some skills in bash coding and you can dig out anything ya like.

and its very stabile platform and a good comminity around it.

Short version:

Zabbix it the tool to use for monitoring things. EOD..

**vitaly_il** · 01-05-2008, 10:22

Zabbix vs. OpenNMS

Does someone have experience with both tools and can compare them?

**fableman** · 02-05-2008, 08:43

Originally posted by vitaly_il

Does someone have experience with both tools and can compare them?

Zabbix have a client you can install on windows and linux servers to get server information about cpu, network load and more, and zabbix can alert,reboot,restart services and more if a service stop running on the server or a program crashed on server.

The other tools dont have a client to perform server tasks like that.

What Zabbix need is a video to show some simple steps and how to set up things with zabbix, combination of graphs / data /alarms, thats would attracts lots of new peopel to zabbix for sure.
If I hade a sexy english narrator voice I could do it

**nightstrike.lalith** · 30-05-2008, 09:34

Zabbix is great!

I've been using Zabbix to monitor my campus wide network for about a month now. The flexibility involved in setting up the triggers and actions and the ability to do agented and simple monitoring makes this a great package. We use the SMS sending capability a lot and it keeps us informed in case something goes wrong. I havent had any problems installing it or using it to monitor critical hosts in our network. All in all, a good network monitoring solution for a CWN.

**cstackpole** · 06-06-2008, 19:07

I have many of the same reasons as others. The flexibility is a huge plus. If I can grab the value, I can monitor it. I had a lot of problems with Nagios and didn't care for it. I do have a love hate relationship with the documentation as well. It is my first source of information, but if I can't get what I need it is frustrating. Same with the forums; they are a great place to get information but there are also many posts that go unanswered.

I loved Ganglia, but before I switched it was a pain to deal with alerts and actions. In fact it is offically unsupported to send emails and actions. That is what pushed me to find something else. Zabbix stepped up to the plate and hit a home run.

I think the reason why I love zabbix the most though, is simply because it takes care of so many things that I dont want to or can't take care of myself. Checking values everyday for the amount of things that I watch over would just be too much for me and consume too much time. Zabbix does all of that for me. I love the flexibility and power.

Originally posted by fableman

What Zabbix need is a video to show some simple steps and how to set up things with zabbix, combination of graphs / data /alarms, thats would attracts lots of new peopel to zabbix for sure.

I have thought about doing this several times. Just do a quick screen capture and stick the videos up on youtube with a link in the wiki. That would be awsome.

Originally posted by fableman

If I hade a sexy english narrator voice I could do it

You and me both

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