Choosing the right tool

Let's discuss a common scenario. You create a matrix adhesion that lists the main features and defines weights for each. So, beginning the prerequisites and testing the concepts does not take long, and you will realize that Zabbix stands out among all comparative tools. The features are very interesting; Zabbix proves flexible enough to meet all the demands of environmental monitoring. It has an API that allows integration with other systems and applications. You can extract reports regarding recurrence alerts on servers and network assets. It is also possible to have monitoring based on historical data and real-time monitoring. Zabbix works with website monitoring, JAVA, IPMI, SNMP, ODBC, and more. Using Zabbix, it is possible to create rules for servers and other devices to start monitoring without human intervention, that is, automatically. Everything seems to fit the company's needs, and there is a large and active users' community helping and supporting this tool. The tool also has a distributed monitoring model that uses proxies (Zabbix proxy) to ensure data collection even if the monitored environment has no communication with the Zabbix server. Another point to be stressed on is the Zabbix GUI, which is pretty rich and full of possibilities. The developer (Zabbix SIA) has a partnership program supported in many countries and uses the local languages. Why wait more? Some users might say that all the features mentioned so far are present in other tools as well, and in some aspects, they may be even better than Zabbix. So what is the advantage in choosing this tool over others?

From my point of view, Zabbix was born with a very advanced concept compared to other players at that time. I remember my compliance matrix perfectly; there were very important points and impacts on our business model that only Zabbix met.

An example is that the distributed monitoring at that time (version 1.4 of Zabbix) did not have the concept of the Zabbix proxy, but the tool already had the concept of distributed monitoring based on nodes (a functionality that was removed in Zabbix 2.4), and this was something new at that time. Another impact on our business was the ability to segment the environment into a user group and a group of hosts with specific permissions for every requirement (read-only, read-write, and so on).

Here's yet another example—the centralized model that Zabbix always had. In this model, the Zabbix agent is a mere collector, which may or may not gain any intelligence. The alert rules and collection settings are managed and controlled by the Zabbix server, thereby avoiding the need to access the agents when the need for adjusting the collection and alert settings arrives.

Let's get back to the most important items in our business way back in 2007. It's been a few years of learning and development of Zabbix SIA, with the hope of it becoming the best open source monitoring tool. In this sentence lies another great argument for Zabbix: the tool is true open source (in the words of Alexei Vladishev). In various projects in which we participated over the years, it became clear that Zabbix does not leave much to be done by the main commercial monitoring tools, along with the advantage of being open source.