Zabbix is an open-sourcemonitoringsoftware tool for diverse IT components, including networks, servers, virtual machines and cloud services. Zabbix provides monitoring metrics, among others network utilization, CPU load and disk space consumption. Zabbix monitoring configuration can be done using XML based templates which contain elements to monitor. The software monitors operations on Linux, Hewlett Packard Unix, Mac OS X, Solaris and other operating systems ; however, Windows monitoring is only possible through agents. Zabbix can use MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data. 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.
Zabbix started as an internal software project in 1998. After three years, in 2001, it was released to the public under GPL, three years later until the first stable version, 1.0, was released in 2004.
Features
High performance, high capacity.
Auto-discovery of servers and network devices and interfaces.
Low-level discovery, automatically starts monitoring new items, file systems or network interfaces among others.
Flexible e-mail notification on predefined events.
Near-real-time notification mechanisms, for example using including XMPP protocol
Development
Zabbix is primarily developed by a Zabbix LLC company.
Releases
Since the first stable version was released as 1.0, Zabbix versioning has used minor version numbers to denote major releases. Each minor release actually implements many new features, while change level releases mostly introduce bugfixes. Zabbix version numbering scheme has changed over time. 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 update to be released as 1.4.
