After seeing Zabbix at VMware Explore for years, I decided it was time to finally spend some quality time with this well-regarded, scalable, and free open-source monitoring solution. It's a powerful platform used by a wide range of organizations, from home lab enthusiasts to Fortune 500 companies, to track the performance and availability of their IT infrastructure. Zabbix offers impressive flexibility, supporting both agent-based and agentless monitoring via protocols such as SNMP, IPMI, and JMX for servers, networks, applications, and cloud services.

My own hands-on experience began with the server installation, which was remarkably straightforward. Heeding Zabbix's claim that it can be installed in 10 minutes, I used a readily available VMware appliance and had it up and running quickly. However, the appliance is not recommended for serious production use. From there, I successfully added agents to both my Windows and Linux systems, a process I also found to be very easy. This quickly allowed me to start monitoring key performance metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, disk space, and network throughput via Zabbix's intuitive web interface.

My initial impression is very positive; Zabbix proved to be easy and intuitive for basic system monitoring, though I know I've only scratched the surface of its capabilities. I look forward to exploring its more advanced features, such as alerting and automation, in the future.

This podcast is based on three articles that I wrote for Virtualization and Cloud Review, which you can read at ⁠

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2025/05/13/zabbix-an-open-source-monitoring-solution.aspx

https://virtualizationreview.com/Articles/2025/05/19/Monitoring-Windows-and-Linux-Systems-Using-Open-Source-Zabbix.aspx

https://virtualizationreview.com/Articles/2025/05/15/Installing-Zabbix-an-Open-Source-Monitoring-Solution.aspx