Vendor Spotlight: Zabbix

Zabbix is a full-stack monitoring system that will automatically track the performance of networks, servers, and applications. The package isn’t so strong at monitoring cloud systems and Web technology, however, it has one remarkable feature: it is completely free to use.

The “free” price tag of Zabbix isn’t a trick. This isn’t a free trial or a core system that requires paid add-ons to make it any good. The tool is completely free to use forever, and all the plug-ins available for it are also free. There is no paid version. So, how does the company that produces it make any money?

Zabbix, LLC isn’t a charity, a state-funded foundation, or a hippy non-profit. It is a commercial business that is expected to make money – at least enough to fund the development of the software and a fully functional customer support team. These people don’t work for free and the owner doesn’t have to live in a tent; the business does actually make money.

Founding and Background

Zabbix was founded by Alexei Vladishev in April 2001. It has been an open-source project since the beginning. Over the years, Zabbix has evolved into a comprehensive network management system, offering monitoring for networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services.

The business was begun in Riga, Latvia, and that is still the location of the company’s headquarters. Zabbix continues to be developed and maintained by a dedicated team, with new features released regularly.

Although Zabbix was started up as an open-source project, it isn’t run by a committee or foundation. The code is proprietary, though it is available to anyone under a GNU GPL license. That means that other companies can modify the code but it cannot be sold on.

Traditionally, open-source projects are developed by a dispersed team of volunteers and coordinated by a central manager. Zabbix wasn’t created like that. Instead, Vladishev formed a company and hired programmers to work for it. The only difference between this tool and other commercial software products is that Zabbix is free to use.

Zabbix has been releasing its product for free since its first edition. The package has been developed and supported throughout its evolution, reaching release number 7.0.4 in September 2024.

Timeline and Evolution

The basic functionality of Zabbix hasn’t really changed since its initial release. The evolution of the package has focused on bug fixes and technical improvements rather than a rewrite of the interface or the addition of monitoring capabilities.

• March 2005: Zabbix was founded by Alexei Vladishev as an open-source IT infrastructure monitoring tool.
• 2005: Zabbix 1.0 was released, introducing basic monitoring capabilities.
• 2009: Zabbix 2.0 brought enhanced scalability and performance improvements.
• 2012: Zabbix 2.2 introduced high availability and failover support.
• November 2012: Zabbix opens its first international office in Tokyo, Japan, to support the growing demand in the Asian market.
• May 2015: Zabbix opens its first North American office in New York, USA, reflecting its growing presence in the United States.
• 2016: Zabbix 3.0 added support for distributed monitoring and improved web-based frontend.
• 2018: Zabbix 4.0 focused on performance optimization and new visualization features.
• 2020: Zabbix 5.0 introduced advanced problem detection and root cause analysis.
• August 2020: Zabbix establishes an office in São Paulo, Brazil, reflecting its commitment to expanding into the Latin American market.
• 2022: Zabbix 6.0 enhanced security features and introduced new integrations.
• June 2024: Zabbix 7.0 LTS (Long Term Support) was released, offering enhanced interoperability and advanced visualization
• October 2024: Zabbix Cloud was launched, a hosted, SaaS platform delivery for Zabbix.

It is important for an open-source system to periodically produce new releases because such projects are known to run out of money and eventually become security risks because of possible unaddressed exploits. So, Zabbix differentiates itself from the pack by keeping its software well-maintained.

Zabbix’s Business Model

Zabbix follows a variation on the freemium marketing strategy. In a freemium scenario, the software provider creates several editions, starting with a basic Free edition. In some cases, the higher plans aren’t even advertised to the general public but are revealed to those who download the “standard version” and use it for a while. This model is very common for mobile apps.

The Zabbix strategy doesn’t involve multiple editions. There is only one version and it is completely free forever. Instead, Zabbix offers consultancy services to businesses that might want to customize the open-source code. This is one of the main sources of income for the Zabbix business. Another income stream comes from an enhanced support department. The company offers five levels of paid professional support. Companies that choose not to buy a package can still access Zabbix’s basic support service – they are not forced to rely on other users for help.

The company has one more service that generates an income, which is its training program. Courses include certified expert courses, which enable outsiders to run their own courses and offer consultancy services for Zabbix customers. The network of training and consultancy businesses enables Zabbix to make assistance available to users all over the world, including in locations where Zabbix LLC doesn’t run offices.

Key People and Company Ownership

The Zabbix platform was originally developed as a side project for Alexei Vladishev, while he was working full-time as a System Architect for Nomad Software. He started up the project in 2001. So, the software was under development for four years, even before Vladishev left his job at Nomad Software and created the Zabbix company.

This factor explains that the Zabbix system is completely Vladishev’s creation and it passed into corporate ownership. Zabbix is a private company and doesn’t publish its shareholder register or even details of its board of directors. However, it is clear that the company is entirely owned by Vladishev.

Zabbix has grown organically and has never needed to invite in investors for funding. So, unlike the majority of IT firms, there are no private equity funds involved in the ownership of the business.

Vladishev is the CEO of Zabbix LLC and as he knows the software intimately, it can be assumed that he is a very hands-on manager of the business.

Locations

Zabbix only needs one location for its software development and that activity takes place at the company headquarters in Riga, Latvia. As selling customer support packages and training provides the company with its main source of income, opening regional offices around the world is a priority for the business. Zabbix now has offices in the following locations besides its Riga headquarters:

• Tokyo, Japan (Asia HQ)
• Shanghai, China
• New York, USA (North America HQ)
• São Paulo, Brazil (Latin America HQ)
• Montreal, Canada
• Berlin, Germany (Europe Sales HQ)
• Mexico City, Mexico

Target Market and Customer Base

Zabbix’s target market and customer base are diverse, reflecting its flexibility and scalability as a network and infrastructure monitoring solution. Here’s a detailed overview of its target market and customer base:

Target Market

Zabbix is designed for businesses and organizations of all sizes, but its features and functionality make it particularly attractive to the following sectors:

Large Enterprises

Zabbix is widely adopted by large enterprises that require reliable monitoring solutions to manage complex IT infrastructures across multiple locations or data centers. These organizations use the package for monitoring servers, networks, databases, cloud infrastructure, and applications. Zabbix’s scalability is crucial for managing thousands of devices and metrics in large environments.

Notable Industries:

• Telecommunications: Telecom companies use Zabbix to monitor vast networks of hardware, software, and connections.
• Financial Services: Banks and financial institutions rely on Zabbix for monitoring critical applications and ensuring service continuity.
• Healthcare: Hospitals and medical organizations use Zabbix for monitoring medical devices, IT infrastructure, and ensuring system uptime for critical services.
• Government: Public sector organizations use Zabbix to ensure system stability, especially in critical infrastructures like utilities, defense, and communications.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

Zabbix is popular among MSPs offering IT and network monitoring services for their clients. MSPs benefit from Zabbix’s multi-tenancy features, its ability to monitor remote locations, and its flexibility to offer services such as performance monitoring, anomaly detection, and issue resolution for client infrastructure.

SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)

Zabbix also targets SMEs, particularly those seeking cost-effective, yet powerful, open-source solutions to monitor their IT systems. For small and medium-sized businesses, Zabbix offers an enterprise-level solution without the licensing costs associated with proprietary software. It’s highly customizable, allowing SMEs to adapt the solution to their specific needs without extensive financial investment.

Cloud Providers and Data Centers

Zabbix is used by cloud infrastructure providers and data centers to monitor virtual machines, storage, networks, and performance. Cloud environments require constant, real-time monitoring of distributed systems and networks, which Zabbix excels at with its capacity for monitoring physical and virtual infrastructure.

DevOps and IT Operations Teams

Zabbix is a critical tool for DevOps teams focusing on continuous integration, deployment, and operation of applications and infrastructure. DevOps and IT operations teams benefit from Zabbix’s support for various integrations, APIs, and automation, as well as monitoring for containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes), cloud services, and hybrid infrastructures.

Customer Base

Zabbix has built a global customer base, including both open-source users and enterprise clients who opt for professional support and services. Key characteristics of its customer base include:

Global Presence

Zabbix is used worldwide, with strong adoption in regions such as:

• North America: Especially by technology companies, financial institutions, and service providers.
• Europe: Zabbix has a large customer base across various sectors, including telecommunications, government, and healthcare.
• Asia: Significant presence in Japan, China, and other parts of Asia, where large companies in telecom, manufacturing, and government sectors rely on Zabbix for monitoring.
• Latin America: Growing customer base following the opening of offices in Brazil and Mexico, with adoption by enterprises and government agencies.

Prominent Customers

Zabbix’s enterprise client list includes a wide range of well-known global brands and institutions:

• Telecommunications: Major telecom companies like Orange and Turk Telekom.
• Banking & Finance: Financial institutions such as Raiffeisen Bank and CaixaBank.
• Technology: IT and cloud providers like Alibaba Cloud.
• Healthcare & Education: Organizations such as Kaspersky Lab (cybersecurity) and several universities around the world.

Open-Source Community

Zabbix has a large, active open-source community comprising system administrators, network engineers, developers, and IT operations professionals. Many users deploy the free version of Zabbix without opting for professional support, benefiting from community advice and shared configurations.

Why Zabbix Appeals to Its Target Market

The fact that Zabbix is free to use isn’t its only attraction. Customers are drawn to the system for the following reasons:

1. Scalability: Zabbix is scalable to handle both small environments with just a few devices and large enterprise setups with thousands of monitored components.
2. Cost-Effective: As an open-source solution, Zabbix eliminates the need for costly licenses, making it attractive to organizations with limited budgets, including SMEs and government institutions.
3. Flexibility: Zabbix can monitor a wide range of systems, from physical devices to virtual environments, cloud services, and containers, allowing organizations to customize monitoring based on their needs.
4. Security: Zabbix includes features like encrypted communications, role-based access control, and integration with security systems, which appeal to sectors like finance and healthcare that prioritize data security.

Zabbix’s Marketing Success

Zabbix’s target market spans from small businesses seeking affordable monitoring to large multinational enterprises requiring scalable, customizable solutions. Its customer base includes companies in industries such as telecommunications, finance, healthcare, and government, with a strong presence globally, particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia. With a strong focus on open-source flexibility, professional support services, and comprehensive monitoring capabilities, Zabbix has built a reputation as a go-to solution for IT infrastructure and network monitoring.

The flagship product of Zabbix is the Zabbix System Monitor, a highly flexible and powerful open-source platform designed to monitor and track the performance and availability of IT infrastructure. Zabbix offers real-time monitoring, alerting, reporting, and a variety of integrations, making it a comprehensive solution for both small and large organizations.

Components of the Zabbix Monitoring System

1. Infrastructure and Network Monitoring

• Servers and Workstations: Zabbix can monitor servers, virtual machines, and workstations, ensuring that hardware and operating systems are performing optimally.
• Network Devices: Routers, switches, firewalls, and other network devices are monitored for performance and uptime. Zabbix supports SNMP, IPMI, and other protocols for diverse device compatibility.
• Applications and Services: Zabbix supports monitoring for a wide range of applications, databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and services (HTTP, SMTP, FTP) for availability and performance.

2. Data Collection

• Agent-Based and Agentless Monitoring: Zabbix supports both methods. With Zabbix agents, it can collect detailed metrics from specific devices. It can also use agentless methods such as SNMP, IPMI, and JMX to gather data from devices where installing an agent isn’t possible.
• Flexible Data Collection: Zabbix is highly adaptable in collecting data such as CPU usage, memory, network traffic, disk space, and custom metrics. Users can define items to monitor based on their needs.

3. Scalability

• From Small to Enterprise: Zabbix is designed to scale from small businesses with a handful of devices to large enterprises that need to monitor thousands of devices and services across multiple locations.
• Distributed Monitoring: Zabbix allows for distributed setups, enabling organizations with global or multi-site infrastructures to manage and monitor systems from a central platform, with remote agents sending data to the main server.

4. Visualization and Reporting

• Custom Dashboards: Zabbix provides highly customizable, real-time dashboards where users can display graphs, maps, and reports visualizing performance data and monitor KPIs.
• Reporting and Alerts: Generate detailed reports on system health, usage trends, and anomalies. Zabbix supports threshold-based alerting, ensuring that alerts are triggered when user-defined conditions are met.
• Network Maps: Create visual representations of your network, showing status information in real-time, which helps administrators quickly identify issues.

5. Event Management and Alerting

• Thresholds and Triggers: Users can set triggers based on thresholds for various metrics (e.g., CPU usage exceeding 90%). When these triggers are activated, Zabbix generates alerts or takes automatic action.
• Alerting and Notifications: Zabbix can send notifications via email, SMS, Telegram, Slack, and other channels. It supports complex notification strategies, including escalation policies to notify the appropriate person based on the severity or time elapsed.
• Auto-Remediation: Zabbix can execute custom scripts to resolve certain problems automatically when a specific condition is met, reducing the need for manual intervention.

6. Security and High Availability

• Encryption: Zabbix supports encryption for secure communication between servers, agents, proxies, and users, ensuring that sensitive data is protected.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Administrators can assign granular permissions to users or groups to ensure only authorized personnel have access to certain parts of the system.
• High Availability: Zabbix supports high-availability configurations, with the ability to run in a failover setup to ensure that the monitoring system itself is resilient and reliable.

7. API and Integrations

• Zabbix API: The system provides an API that allows for deep integrations with third-party tools and services, as well as the automation of monitoring tasks. This API is often used for integrating with ticketing systems, DevOps pipelines, and other IT management tools.
• Integration with DevOps and Cloud Tools: Zabbix integrates with popular tools like Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, OpenStack, and cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). This is essential for organizations leveraging cloud or containerized environments.

8. Machine Learning and Anomaly Detection

• Predictive Monitoring: The latest versions of Zabbix introduce machine learning algorithms that can detect anomalies and forecast potential problems based on historical data.
• Trend Analysis: Zabbix can analyze trends over time, helping organizations identify performance degradation or predict when resources (such as disk space) will run out.

Benefits of Zabbix System Monitor

• Open Source: Zabbix is completely open-source, with no licensing fees. This allows companies of all sizes to benefit from a professional-grade monitoring solution without the high cost of proprietary alternatives.
• Flexibility and Customization: Zabbix can be customized extensively to suit the needs of any organization. Whether it’s monitoring custom applications, integrating with third-party systems, or tailoring the dashboard to specific KPIs, Zabbix provides the flexibility to adapt to any IT environment.
• Scalability: It’s used by both small businesses and large enterprises, proving its ability to scale efficiently based on the size and complexity of an organization’s infrastructure.
• Community and Professional Support: Zabbix has a large, active user community that contributes plugins, templates, and troubleshooting advice. For enterprise clients, Zabbix also offers professional support services.

Zabbix Assessment

The Zabbix Monitoring System is a highly adaptable open-source solution that provides comprehensive monitoring for networks, servers, applications, and cloud environments. Its flexibility, scalability, and enterprise-grade features make it suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries, from SMEs to large global enterprises. Zabbix’s open-source nature and extensive customization options, along with its ability to handle complex IT environments, solidify it as a leader in the network and infrastructure monitoring space.

Other Notable Products

1. Zabbix Cloud

Zabbix Cloud is a new deployment option offered by Zabbix. Users always had the option of installing the Zabbix software on a virtual server from AWS, Azure, or GCP, however, this option is a SaaS platform with Zabbix providing the hosting. Other than the hosting service, storage space, and technicians to maintain the software., the Zabbix experience is exactly the same as the regular software package.

2. Zabbix Support Packages

Zabbix offers a range of Support Packages tailored to meet the needs of different organizations, whether they are small businesses or large enterprises. These support plans provide expert assistance with the installation, configuration, optimization, and troubleshooting of the Zabbix monitoring platform.

The support packages come in several tiers: Silver, Gold, Platinum, Enterprise, and Global. These levels allow customers to select the level of assistance that best matches their needs and infrastructure complexity. Each package covers essential services such as unlimited technical support via email or phone, access to future Zabbix software updates, and guidance for resolving issues, with higher-tier packages offering faster response times, 24/7 availability, and dedicated technical account managers.

Major Competitors

Here are major competitors to Zabbix, each offering unique approaches to network and infrastructure monitoring:

1. Nagios A popular open-source monitoring tool that tracks servers, networks, and applications. Known for its extensive plugin support, it offers flexibility but can be complex to configure for large infrastructures. Nagios Core is free, while Nagios XI provides advanced features like dashboards and reporting. It’s ideal for IT admins needing a customizable, mature tool.
2. Prometheus An open-source system, excels at monitoring cloud-native environments and containerized infrastructure. It uses a time-series database to collect metrics, making it popular among DevOps teams, especially in Kubernetes setups. With PromQL for querying, it’s powerful but lacks built-in distributed support. Often used alongside Grafana for visualization, Prometheus is ideal for modern cloud architectures.
3. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) A proprietary, enterprise-grade tool focused on network performance monitoring and fault detection. It offers easy-to-use dashboards, multi-vendor support, and comprehensive reporting. It’s ideal for large organizations managing complex network environments. However, its licensing cost can be steep, making it less attractive for smaller companies compared to open-source solutions like Zabbix.
4. Datadog A SaaS-based monitoring platform built for cloud infrastructure and applications. With strong integrations into AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes, it offers real-time analytics and alerting. It’s a top choice for dynamic cloud environments but can become expensive at scale. While Datadog is highly visual and user-friendly, it focuses primarily on cloud over hybrid setups.
5. Icinga Α fork of Nagios provides comprehensive monitoring for servers, networks, and applications. It improves on Nagios with a modern UI, better high-availability support, and an API. Popular for large enterprises, Icinga offers flexibility with plugins and integrations, though its complex setup process can be challenging for smaller teams with limited resources.
6. PRTG Network Monitor PRTG by Paessler offers all-in-one monitoring for networks, servers, and cloud services through an intuitive, sensor-based model. It supports various metrics like bandwidth and CPU. PRTG’s automatic discovery and easy-to-use interface make it suitable for businesses of all sizes, though the cost can escalate quickly as more sensors are added, making it pricier than Zabbix.

Spotlight Wrap-Up

Zabbix has three advantages over many of its rivals. The first of these is that it is a reliable, well-established monitoring tool with an attractive dashboard. The next advantage is that the system is free, which is great for small businesses, but can be professionally supported, which is important for large organizations. The final advantage is that the system can be customized through accessing a library of templates and it can exchange data with other systems through integrations.

The income strategy of Zabbix is pretty unique and is a winner. Zabbix has recently launched Zabbix Cloud, for which the company levels a subscription fee. This is a new income stream and mimics the journey trod by other free software systems, including Elastic Stack and Graylog.