Debian – Zabbix: system.cpu.load[,]

I think it would be best to concentrate on answering the specific questions you had, taking into account the size of your planned deployment (~10 monitored hosts).

1. What are the general disadvantages of Zabbix?

   • it won't automagically figure out what to monitor, when to alert you and etc - you will have to think about what metrics you are interested in and configure them upfront
   • debugging leaves something to be desired. although with such a small environment help options like forum, irc channel etc should suffice easily

2. Does Zabbix have a small footprint on boxes it is monitoring?

   Yes, definitely. Zabbix can monitor using methods like SNMP, simple network checks (is a port open?), and it also has native agent for many platforms. As the agent is written in C, it has an extremely small footprint (as opposed to bunch of interpreted scripts...). You can easily combine different checks on a single monitored host. Note that you are not limited to monitoring servers, you can also add network devices and other things.

3. Do I really need to setup an entire other server for it? I currently have a server that is under very light load -- can I dual purpose it?

   Depends - if it's running one of the supported operating systems for the server - definitely. For that environment requirements will be really low. Make sure to use default templates only as a guideline, it's suggested to create your own with longer intervals between checks. Basically, Zabbix consists of 3 components - DB, frontend, server. If you desire so, you can reuse existing database server and existing webserver in the company for the first two components, and then run Zabbix server on any supported platform - that's a perfectly valid configuration.

Any specific queries would be very welcome in #zabbix on Freenode.

I'm a Windows guy as well, and the only Linux machines I have are our Zabbix machines (of which we have a few).

If you're interested in getting your feet wet in Linux (it's really no more than a paddle pool, I promise), Zabbix is a great way to do so, because if you use Ubuntu Server, everything comes in neat packages that you install, very similar to how you'd expect to get it done on Windows, and once it's been set up, you can mostly leave the console alone and interact with it via a web interface.

_{To be fair though, I've dabbled in FreeBSD for around 10 years. Nothing serious, but enough to know the basic commands to get around, so although I don't really know how to run and administer Linux, I do know the basics}