Zabbix

Zabbix is enterprise open source monitoring software for networks and applications, created by Alexei Vladishev. It is designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware.

Zabbix uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data.^[2] Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. Zabbix offers several monitoring options:

• Simple checks can verify the availability and responsiveness of standard services such as SMTP or HTTP without installing any software on the monitored host.
• A Zabbix agent can also be installed on UNIX and Windows hosts to monitor statistics such as CPU load, network utilization, disk space, etc.
• As an alternative to installing an agent on hosts, Zabbix includes support for monitoring via SNMP, TCP and ICMP checks, as well as over IPMI, JMX, SSH, Telnet and using custom parameters. Zabbix supports a variety of near-real-time notification mechanisms, including XMPP.

Released under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2, Zabbix is free software.

History

Zabbix started as an internal software project in 1998. After three years, in 2001, it was released to the public under GPL.^[3] It took three more years until the first stable version, 1.0, was released in 2004.

Dashboard of the Zabbix 3.0.0 release

Features

• High performance, high capacity (able to monitor hundreds of thousands of devices)
• Auto-discovery of servers and network devices
• Low-level discovery
• Distributed monitoring with centralized web administration
• Support for both polling and trapping mechanisms
• Native high performance agents (client software for Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, Tru64/OSF1, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7)
• Agent-less monitoring
• JMX monitoring
• Web monitoring
• Secure user authentication
• Flexible user permissions
• Web-based interface
• SLA, and ITIL KPI metrics on reporting
• Flexible e-mail notification on predefined events
• High-level (business) view of monitored resources through user-defined visual console screens and dashboards
• Audit log

Development

Zabbix 2.4 Dashboard page

Today, Zabbix is primarily developed by a dedicated company, also called Zabbix.

Source code

Zabbix consists of several separate modules:

• Server
• Agents
• Frontend
• Proxy

While the server, proxy and agents are written in C, the frontend is implemented in PHP and Javascript.

Java gateway, available since Zabbix 2.0, is written in Java.

Releases

Since the first stable version was released as 1.0, Zabbix versioning has only increased minor version numbers. Each minor release actually implements many new features, while change level releases mostly introduce bugfixes.

Zabbix version numbering scheme has changed. While the first two stable branches were 1.0 and 1.1, after 1.1 it was decided to use odd numbers for development versions and even numbers for stable versions. As a result, 1.3 followed 1.1 as a development release to be released as 1.4.

Timeline

Note: this chart excludes release candidates in stable branches.

See also

• Comparison of network monitoring systems

References

External links

• (English) Zabbix Loadable Module that execute php directly in the engine

Support sites

• Zabbix Home Page
• Zabbix Forum provides user support in English, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French
• Zabbix Wiki has user-contributed content and community resources
• Commercial Services, including support, custom development and deployment services are provided by Zabbix company
• ZabbixZone, blog dedicated to Zabbix for advanced users
• Zabbix Online Demo with current dev version of Zabbix, use "Login as Guest" link

Books

English

• (2010) Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring - Packt Publishing ISBN 978-1-84719-768-9
• (2013) Mastering Zabbix - Packt Publishing ISBN 978-1-78328-349-1
• (2015) Zabbix Cookbook - Packt Publishing
• (2015) Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials - Packt Publishing
• (2016) Zabbix Network Monitoring - Second Edition - Packt Publishing ISBN 9781782161288

Japanese

• (2010) Zabbix System Monitoring - Notification, Trend analysis, Visualization to reduce your management work - ISBN 978-4-7741-4213-5

Zabbix installations

• Map of Zabbix Installations

Third-party libraries and tools

See all Zabbix third-party projects from all Zabbix sources Zabbix Searcher.

Community repositories

See the Zabbix community repos on Github. It links many Zabbix projects: templates, script, APIs, integrations, ...

Libraries

See the Zabbix community site for a list of libraries.

Data collection extensions

• Orabbix monitor Oracle with Zabbix.
• Postbix monitor PostgreSQL with Zabbix.
• MySQLBix monitor MySQL with Zabbix.
• MySQL-Performance-Monitor monitor MySQL with Zabbix.
• Zapcat is a Zabbix to JMX bridge for monitoring Java services.
• Zabbix MySQL Monitor all Zabbix MySQL Monitor all.

Mobile clients

Browser-based

• MozBX is a browser-based mobile client.

Android

• Mobbix is a Zabbix Android mobile client.
• Zabbix Triggers Widget is a Zabbix Android mobile client with Desktop-Widgets
• Zabbkit is a free Android Zabbix mobile client.

iPhone

• Zabbkit is a free Zabbix Client for iPhone.
• Mozaby is a Zabbix client for iPhone.
• MobileOp is a Zabbix Client for iPhone.

Windows Phone

• Zabbkit is a free Windows Phone Zabbix mobile client.