31 March 2017

Zabbix based OpenSource monitoring solution – what’s the benefit for you?

We at Soitron decided to switch to open source monitoring. If you are also wondering what to consider when monitoring your network, read about how we made our decision. 

 

Why OpenSource:

  1. A qualitative leap forward in OpenSource solutions and their full competitiveness with long-established proprietary solutions (CA, Tivoli, HP Open View).
  2. The flexibility to use only the functionality we need, with the option of customizing the solution on our own, or using ready-made community solutions.
  3. An attractive licensing model in which the OpenSource group, in cooperation with Zabbix, publishes content for free download.

 

If your customers include banking institutions in the Slovak market, automotive industry subcontractors, energy companies and water utilities, you should not build your monitoring solution based on any software available on the Internet. We have gradually narrowed down our selection to two candidates – Nagios and Zabbix.

The ultimate winner of the battle between these two solutions is Zabbix because it meets a few essential criteria:

  • Well-handled HW monitoring with a wide range of necessary solutions
  • Support for network device and element monitoring
  • Highly developed operating system monitoring functionality
  • Support for standard business application monitoring
  • Solution customization possible
  • Designing a customized monitoring to fit our needs
  • Connection to OpenSource ITSM tools
  • Efficient use of system resources
  • It’s OpenSource

Zabbix managed to establish itself as a standard in recent years, and several companies have successfully implemented it and are happy to use it. It’s actually not so surprising. Monitoring issues are usually experienced in the following situations:

  1. A smart IT specialist who is busy at 150% is tasked, among other things, with monitoring. In fact, even if they wanted to, realistically they have no time to actually meaningfully do something about it.
  2. There is a missing link between monitoring and any follow-up actions. Even if monitoring generates an alarm, it never gets to the Service Desk or the IT engineer in charge who would take appropriate measures to remedy the undesired condition.
  3. However, customer’s IT environment complexity requires a very specific set of monitoring solutions (highly developed SNMP traps, incident correlators, specific in-house applications), especially if the customer is unable to monitor necessary systems using existing publically available solutions.

 

When faced with any of the above situations, one option is to approach a partner who can:

  • Provide monitoring as a service
  • Help you with the implementation of your in-house monitoring
  • Develop missing monitoring solutions

Do you want to learn more, or try the demo? Contact us.

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