Is Zabbix the Right Monitoring Tool?

monitoringzabbix

I just want to monitor a small handful of servers (less than 10).

From reading various places it sounds like the top leading contenders (for open source at least) are:

  • nagios
  • munin
  • zabbix

From what I have read a lot of people tend to use munin and nagios together — munin for history and graphs, and nagios for alerting.

On the other hand it sounds like Zabbix is a more complete solution and easier to configure than either of the other two. So I was thinking of going that route.

My thoughts right now are:

  1. What are the general disadvantages of Zabbix?
  2. Does Zabbix have a small footprint on boxes it is monitoring?
  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?

Best Answer

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.

Related Topic