All posts by Michael Kammer

Distributed Monitoring with Zabbix and Entelgy

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/distributed-monitoring-with-zabbix-and-entelgy/32566/

Entelgy is an international consulting and technology firm specializing in cybersecurity, digital transformation, and advanced IT operations.

By leveraging tools like Zabbix, Entelgy helps organizations implement scalable and distributed monitoring architectures that ensure reliability, visibility, and performance across complex infrastructures.

The challenge

Since 2018, Entelgy has relied on Zabbix as its primary monitoring tool to provide large multinational clients with full visibility into the health and performance of their services and infrastructure. As both the infrastructure and the management of the monitoring platform itself grew in complexity, the need emerged for a unified, centralized view capable of integrating the monitoring of all customer environments.

These customers span a wide range of industries and represent some of the most prestigious global organizations, covering everything from a leading video streaming platform operating across South America to mining corporations, global financial services providers, major chemical and construction firms, the stock exchange of one of the world’s largest financial centers, and Spain’s largest internet service provider.

To meet this growing challenge, Entelgy turned once again to Zabbix — this time to build a centralized monitoring layer on top of its distributed infrastructure.

The solution

For each client, Entelgy deploys a dedicated Zabbix server with its own database and built-in redundancy to ensure reliability and scalability. When necessary, Zabbix proxies are also installed directly within the client’s infrastructure, securely reporting back to the central server using encrypted communications.

On average, each monitored environment tracks over 50,000 individual metrics, covering everything from service availability to infrastructure performance. When any of these metrics indicates a potential issue, a Zabbix action is automatically triggered to notify the operations team responsible for that specific client environment, ensuring rapid incident resolution.

To maintain full visibility and ensure that every monitoring platform across is operating correctly, Entelgy leverages several key features of Zabbix:

  • Remote monitoring capabilities. All client-side Zabbix servers and proxies report to a centralized Zabbix instance that collects internal monitoring data for the entire infrastructure. Thanks to Zabbix’s prioritization of remote metrics, Entelgy’s operations team can observe the status of all monitoring environments in real time and effectively prioritize their response efforts.
  • Automated alerts and incident management. Every metric is tied to a corresponding trigger and alarm. When a problem is detected, Zabbix not only logs the issue but also automatically creates a support ticket, updates SLA tracking, and sends real-time notifications directly to platform administrators via their smartphones.
  • An open source ecosystem. By relying entirely on open source technologies for internal monitoring, Entelgy can adopt the latest features and improvements from the Zabbix ecosystem as soon as they are released. This allows both clients and operations teams to benefit from continuous innovation and the most up-to-date monitoring capabilities.
  • Secure access and client segmentation. Thanks to the integration of LDAP, SAML, and Zabbix’s native role-based access control (RBAC), Entelgy can easily onboard administrators, operators, and client users while ensuring fast, simple, and secure access to the platform. Data visibility is carefully segmented to separate client views from internal operational dashboards, guaranteeing both security and clarity.
  • Custom branding for client environments. Zabbix’s flexibility also allows for full client-specific branding of each monitoring environment. This has proven to be a key differentiator for Entelgy’s clients, who value maintaining a consistent corporate identity across platforms without compromising any of the capabilities offered by Zabbix.

Zabbix provides Entelgy with a unified, fully open source monitoring solution that covers both client environments and internal systems — enabling faster response times, reduced operational complexity, and full control across distributed infrastructures.

The results

“With Zabbix as a core part of our operations, we have full confidence in the monitoring and control of every client environment — no matter how complex or distributed it may be. This allows us to focus on delivering value to our customers, ensuring stability, visibility, and continuous improvement in their infrastructure operations.” – José García, Zabbix Certified Expert at Entelgy

By leveraging Zabbix for distributed monitoring, Entelgy and its clients have achieved significant operational and strategic benefits, including:

  • Improved reliability and service continuity, enabled by proactive detection of infrastructure issues across multiple client environments, ensuring uninterrupted operations for global companies.
  • Increased operational efficiency, driven by automated alerts, ticket creation, SLA tracking, and real-time mobile notifications, allowing faster incident resolution and improved team coordination.
  • High monitoring granularity, with a one-minute update interval for most collected metrics, enabling near real-time incident detection and resolution.
  • More than 1,000 automated tickets generated monthly, fully integrated with ticketing systems using native Zabbix capabilities combined with Python and Bash scripting, eliminating the need for expensive third-party licenses.
  • A comprehensive backup system for both client devices as well as Zabbix databases and configurations, enabling disaster recovery in just a few minutes.
  • Centralized visibility across all platforms through a unified monitoring layer that aggregates hundreds of thousands of metrics from isolated client environments.
  • Secure and segmented access, enabled by LDAP and SAML integrations and role-based access control, ensuring that clients, administrators, and operators can safely access the platform with clearly defined permissions.
  • Enhanced client experience and branding, with each Zabbix instance customized to reflect the client’s corporate identity, maintaining brand consistency without compromising functionality.
  • Continuous innovation supported by a fully open-source ecosystem, allowing Entelgy to rapidly adopt the latest Zabbix features and improvements as soon as they become available.
  • Proven scalability and flexibility, thanks to the ability of Zabbix to adapt to complex, multi-tenant enterprise environments while maintaining high performance, cost efficiency, and long-term sustainability.

Conclusion

At Entelgy, Zabbix is not just the tool of choice — it’s a single, unified platform used to monitor the infrastructure of every client, as well as internal Entelgy systems. By standardizing on Zabbix across all layers of operation, they have eliminated the need for additional monitoring tools, significantly reducing complexity, operational overhead, and costs.

This unified approach allows Entelgy’s teams to work more efficiently, respond faster to incidents, and continuously improve service quality — all while maintaining full visibility and control over distributed environments. With Zabbix at the core, Entelgy delivers reliable, scalable, and cost-effective monitoring at every level.

Entelgy is transforming how large multinational organizations manage and monitor their critical infrastructure by delivering secure, scalable, and highly customized monitoring solutions. By trusting Zabbix as the foundation of its distributed monitoring strategy, Entelgy ensures early detection of issues, seamless integration across diverse environments, and continuous service improvement — helping clients stay focused on their business while maintaining full operational control.

The post Distributed Monitoring with Zabbix and Entelgy appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Zabbix in 2025: A Year of Growth, Community, and Innovation

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-in-2025-a-year-of-growth-community-and-innovation/32470/

2025 has been a dynamic and crucial year for Zabbix — marked not just by global events and major releases, but also by meaningful community engagement, an important milestone in our history, new ways of sharing expertise, and headcount growth around the world – all while making sure our product evolves to provide even more value for our valued customers and partners. Let’s dig in!

Celebrating 20 years in business

On April 12, Zabbix officially celebrated its 20th anniversary as a company. It was a time for our entire community to step back, take stock, and imagine what the future might bring as our offices threw some amazing birthday parties to celebrate two decades of growing (and monitoring) together!

“I’m very satisfied with the results we’ve achieved as a company and I’m extremely grateful for our community, customers, and partners – they make everything we do possible.” – Alexei Vladishev, Zabbix Founder and CEO

A new path toward Zabbix expertise

In October, we launched Zabbix Academy, an online learning platform that offers a comprehensive library of interactive courses that are designed to help users master every aspect of Zabbix, on their own time and at their own speed.

Zabbix Academy includes everything from an introduction to open-source monitoring to advanced Zabbix security administration. There’s no need for any prior certification or training, and Zabbix Academy offers certifications and skill assessments aligned with Zabbix standards as well as a flexible pricing model that includes both free and paid courses and webinars, plus the ability to choose either a single standalone course or a yearly subscription.

“Our community is our greatest asset, and we believe that continuous learning is essential for long-term success, and Zabbix Academy is proof of that commitment.” – Kristine Lamberte, Head of Training at Zabbix

Nous sommes Zabbix!

In addition to all the other positive news, 2025 will be remembered as the year we announced the acquisition of our long-term partner IZI-IT and the establishment of Zabbix France, a new regional office dedicated to providing localized support and closer collaboration with French users and enterprises.

Headed by IZI-IT Founder and CEO Steve Destivelle, Zabbix France will leverage France’s strong technology ecosystem, skilled workforce, and strategic location to build a new European hub that will enable faster response times, support compliance with regional business and regulatory expectations, and ultimately boost our brand visibility across Europe.

Home sweet home

2025 also happened to be the year in which Zabbix finally outgrew our long-time Riga location. In September, our search for new premises led us to make the move to a larger and more suitable office space. The new office is spacious, flexible, easily accessible by bicycle or public transport, and features a modern infrastructure that can help us continue growing and competing in the global marketplace.

Building a better product

The big news on the product development front was the release of Zabbix 7.4 in July. Zabbix 7.4 introduces a wide variety of new features that users have requested, while delivering significant UI/UX improvements that make monitoring with Zabbix even more accessible and efficient. Looking forward, our teams are also working hard to bring the next generation of Zabbix features to life, with the following projects in the works:

  • Zabbix 8.0 LTS, which will introduce leading-edge technical features as well as a redesigned user interface with enhanced visualizations for a more intuitive and user-friendly experience.
  • Zabbix Mobile, an official Zabbix Mobile App for iOS and Android that will put instant push notifications, incident management, and seamless collaboration at your fingertips.
  • Zabbix Marketplace, a global platform designed to connect users, partners, and vendors in order to help them exchange information and discover new solutions together.

Growing our community

From major conferences to local meetups and knowledge-sharing events, the global Zabbix ecosystem came together like never before in 2025! Everything we do at Zabbix happens with the knowledge that our community is what sets us apart, which is why we’ll always meet our members wherever they happen to be.

Our global events gave monitoring professionals, partners, and enthusiasts a valuable forum to share their real-world expertise, helping our users keep pace with evolving technologies, strengthening their professional networks, and making sure that community feedback continues to shape our offerings. Some of the highlights included:

  • 12 Zabbix Labs across Latin America, designed to foster vocational education and train specialized professionals who are ready for the professional challenges of the future.
  • 1 regional forum in Mexico City that brought together regional experts to discuss trends, share experiences, and explore how open source tools are changing the technology landscape.
  • 5 conferences (Benelux, Germany, China, Japan, and Latin America) that delivered a unique mix of practical knowledge, direct access to experts, and networking opportunities.
  • Innumerable exhibitions, trade fairs, and expos, which boosted our brand and built relationships.
  • One incredible Zabbix Summit in Riga that brought together hundreds of professionals, developers, partners, and users to share insights, learn from expert talks and workshops, and explore real-world case studies on effective Zabbix use.

Meanwhile, 2025 saw our headcount grow in every one of our global offices, as more and more talented individuals got wind of what we’re doing and chose to be a part of it.

Not to be outdone, our partners team also added 16 Resellers and 16 Certified Partners to our roster of global associates, all while revising and updating our Partner Program to bring Zabbix services to new users in more locations and in additional languages.

Staying safe

Security is not a one-time milestone for Zabbix, but a continuous process. In 2025, we focused on making our security practices more proactive, transparent, and deeply embedded into how we build and operate our products and services.

In 2025 we successfully recertified our ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 27017:2015 certifications for another 3 year period. At the same time, our HackerOne bug bounty program continued to be a solid line of defense, as 2025 brought 24 valid submissions that netted $16,700 in bounties.

Furthermore, as Latvia’s only CNA, Zabbix continued to refine its CVE workflows with faster triage and publication timelines, as well as improved vulnerability severity assessment and documentation.

Giving back

During the 2025 holiday season, we continued what may be the most important Zabbix tradition at all – lending our support to local organizations that make a real difference in our communities, including those that provided family support, food relief, access to healthcare and rehabilitation services, and simple holiday joy to senior citizens.

Due in large part to efforts like these, in November Zabbix was named “Enterprise of Riga 2025” in the ICT category – a recognition awarded to the most successful and impactful companies in Riga’s priority sectors. The award highlights not only business results but also contributions to innovation, sustainability, employee well-being, and the growth of the local tech ecosystem.

Looking ahead to 2026

In keeping with our new slogan “Your business works – you know it,” the plan for 2026 and beyond is to evolve from a traditional monitoring tool to a full observability platform, as our Founder and CEO laid out in his keynote speech during Zabbix Summit 2025.

We’re also planning to up our game when it comes to community engagement and training, meaning conferences, meetups, trainings, online events, and global expos that take into account feedback from our community and are increasingly tailored to provide members with what they need most.

With that in mind, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank our amazing global community for everything they did to make 2025 such a success. Whether it was in the form of blog contributions translating documentation, or creating templates and widgets, our community showed up in a big way all throughout the year.

It also goes without saying that we couldn’t have made 2025 the year that it was without our customers, whose trust, collaboration, and commitment to excellence continued to inspire us, drive innovation across everything we do, and allow us to stay open source and innovative.

“Looking ahead, I am genuinely excited about what is coming next in 2026. We have ambitious goals, but I have no doubt whatsoever that together, as one strong, amazing team, we will deliver, grow and continue building something we can all be proud of.” – Alexei Vladishev

The post Zabbix in 2025: A Year of Growth, Community, and Innovation appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Stronger Together: Succeeding with the Zabbix Partner Program

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/stronger-together-succeeding-with-the-zabbix-partner-program/32425/

Ready to scale faster and grow smarter in 2026? If so, it might just be time to take a fresh look at the Zabbix Partner Program.

As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, the Partner Program is a lot more than just an extra layer on top of the software. It’s an invitation to be part of a community, a chance to gain access to advanced Zabbix training and certifications, an opportunity to dramatically expand your business reach, and a way to level up from skilled Zabbix practitioners to globally recognized experts.

What’s new in the Zabbix Partner Program?

In 2025, we made a good thing even better by revising and updating our Partner Program in order to bring Zabbix services to new users, in more locations, and in additional languages. Some of these changes include:

  • Granting more freedom to the Premium partners and supporting their business in cases outside their original territory.
  • Giving outstanding partners the visibility they deserve.
  • Engaging partners in a wider variety of activities and leveraging their expertise.
  • Sharing more business with partners.
  • Communicating better with partners about expectations and how to work with Zabbix.

As evidence of how becoming a Zabbix Partner can give your business a boost, here are a few success stories from five of our top partners.

Somone

Specialists in IT supervision and observability, Somone offers their clients strategic management of services and business indicators. Their experience with a variety of monitoring tools and track record of success with major accounts makes them a key player in the surveillance and observability spheres.

When the Paris-based company became a Zabbix Partner in 2023, they immediately took advantage of Zabbix Certified training and got all their employees certified as Zabbix users. This gave every employee a personal stake in the partnership and quickly brought everyone from the sales team to technical experts up to speed on Zabbix.

The company also notably encouraged its employees to speak at Zabbix events, which strengthened the relationship with Zabbix and encouraged a free exchange of ideas, which in turn helped Somone’s employees bring new ideas to life and improve processes.

As a result, Somone’s own Zabbix training offer has brought a host of new customers and increased their credibility in a crowded and competitive marketplace. In addition, having their own Zabbix team has been an enormous benefit – they have gone from having no real Zabbix strategy to building a dedicated team with their own sales and project leads.

Metricio

A Zabbix Partner for 5 years, Metricio is a Swedish IT services and consulting company that provides professional services and monitoring solutions for the Nordic market. They rely on Zabbix to deliver a cost-efficient and reliable monitoring solution that strengthens their portfolio and helps their customers achieve a higher level of efficiency.

When Metricio first became a Zabbix Partner, they found the Zabbix Partner team’s guidance to be invaluable. They have since advised other partners that they should not hesitate to reach out in the event of questions or concerns. In addition, they have organized several Zabbix-related meetings and events in Sweden, all of which have been more effective thanks to the presence of Zabbix team members.

Metricio worked hard during their first year to strengthen their position and set a goal to become Zabbix Premium Partners by their second year. Today, more than 70% of their leads come from the Zabbix Partner page or joint events. Teaming up with Zabbix has become the foundation of Metricio’s growth, their brand, and their success in the Swedish market.

ASPL Info

ASPL Info is a technology enterprise that aims to revolutionize businesses with best-in-class IT services and digital transformations. They boast a track record of success with global enterprises from a wide variety of sectors and geographies, including HP, Titan, Karnataka Bank, Trust Bank, Tata Sky, William Penn, Bajaj, Maruti, Emirates, Marico, Lupin, Dhanalaxmi Bank, HPE (Ministry of Home Affairs – MHA), Alstom, Birlasoft, Sify Digital, Tamilnad Mercantile Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Tata-Elxsi, and Airtel.

As a Zabbix Premium Zabbix Partner, ASPL Info has broadened their horizons by working closely with the Zabbix OEM team, engaging early in joint opportunity planning, solution design and roadmap discussions. This has enabled faster project delivery and stronger customer outcomes. Meanwhile, building a highly skilled and certified team via Zabbix Certified trainings has guaranteed consistent delivery quality, better customer confidence, and a deeper understanding of enterprise-scale deployments.

The team at ASPL Info has also greatly benefited from active participation in Zabbix community and partner initiatives, including webinars, regional events, and marketing collaborations. These interactions not only enhance technical expertise but create valuable networking opportunities and visibility, while leveraging Zabbix’s cobranding, marketing and joint engagement initiatives have amplified ASPL Info’s credibility and supported business growth across new markets.

By getting the most out of their Zabbix partnership, ASPL Info has been able to rapidly streamline solution design, accelerate deployment, and strengthen customer confidence, while encouraging their engineers to pursue Zabbix certifications and continuous learning has built deeper in-house expertise, which in turn has allowed them to deliver more value and greater flexibility to their clients.

Since teaming up with Zabbix, ASPL Info have grown around 30–35% in service delivery engagements, maintained a consistent 97% resolution rate for customer queries and complaints related to Zabbix, and achieved 98% customer retention by continuing high-quality services and support throughout and even after the renewal process.

The ATS Group

As the sole Premium Zabbix Partner in North America, the ATS Group has seen strong growth by combining deep technical expertise with Zabbix’s proven monitoring platform and building a practical, collaborative relationship that’s based on accessibility, responsiveness, and mutual trust.

Their team has benefited greatly by engaging directly with the Zabbix team, finding out time and time again that open communication and quick access to the right people make a meaningful difference when delivering results for clients. Another key takeaway they have noted is the benefits of aligning Zabbix with a broader service conversation. Rather than leading with product features, they instead focus on outcomes, highlighting the ways in which Zabbix supports automation, observability, and operational excellence within modern IT environments.

The ATS Group’s partnership with Zabbix has led to new enterprise engagements and an increased awareness of Zabbix in North America through joint marketing activities and technical enablement efforts. The flexibility and support provided by the Zabbix team have been instrumental in helping their team tailor solutions to client needs while growing their monitoring and automation services.

OpenSource ICT Solutions

With a truly global footprint and Zabbix Premium Partner status, OpenSource ICT Solutions serves as a great example of how far being a Zabbix partner can take a business. In many regions they hold the status of “Certified Partner” or “Premium Delivery Partner.” They also operate as an official Zabbix reseller — meaning they can sell Zabbix support and services to customers while offering Zabbix consultancy and implementation services, providing official Zabbix training, and supplying support and managed services.

Their Premium Partner status and close relationship with the Zabbix team has taught them a few very important lessons – first and foremost of which is that Zabbix simply isn’t for everyone. It’s a great fit for many customers, but not all. Their policy is to always be honest about that and to never try to sell something that doesn’t make sense for the client.

They also recommend solving a problem rather than selling a product – in their view, the focus should be on delivering solutions that address real customer needs instead of pushing features. When in doubt, they always reach out to Partners team at Zabbix, who are always there to support them and who have access to valuable internal resources that let them come up with insights and materials that can make a real difference.

The team at OpenSource ICT Solutions also stresses the merits of participating in Zabbix meetings consistently, with every event they’ve attended leading to new customer relationships and strengthening existing ones. Additionally, they have found that blog posts and webinars have been highly effective, as they build visibility and showcase expertise, ultimately strengthening the team’s reputation and customer trust.

Lessons learned

The companies mentioned above are all very different and have used their status as members of the Zabbix Partner Program to achieve different goals, but there are a number of strategies for success and common best practices that apply to all of them, including:

  • Participation. Every partner mentioned above gained significant advantages by participating in Zabbix conferences and meetings, including better visibility and brand recognition, direct access to new leads and business opportunities, early insights Into the Zabbix roadmap and upcoming features, the opportunity to share expertise, and a strengthened relationship with the Zabbix team.
  • Engagement. Working more closely with the Zabbix Partner team provides tangible benefits in the form of more leads and co-selling opportunities, access to exclusive resources (like sales kits, marketing materials, and campaign support), direct access to Zabbix engineers (for architectural guidance, complex deployments, and troubleshooting), and strategic influence via feedback on product roadmaps and participation in advisory discussions.
  • Knowledge acquisition. Up-skilling and cross-skilling teams via Zabbix Certified trainings and our new Zabbix Academy courses benefits partners by ensuring that partner teams have the best possible understanding of Zabbix architecture, deployment, tuning, and troubleshooting, resulting in more efficient and stable deployments, faster problem resolution, and the ability to handle more complex customer environments. Partners can also use Zabbix certification to demonstrate competence during pre-sales, differentiate themselves from non-certified competitors, and build overall customer confidence in their services.

In conclusion

If your company provides IT services, system integration, managed services, or consulting, joining the Zabbix Partner Program is not just an extra benefit or a nice-to-have — it can become a core pillar of business growth. Reach out to our team and get started on the road to greater opportunity today!

The post Stronger Together: Succeeding with the Zabbix Partner Program appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Building an “Academy of Uptime” with Kristine Lamberte

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/building-an-academy-of-uptime-with-kristine-lamberte/31773/

If you’ve been working with Zabbix (or are planning to), you’re in luck – we’ve recently launched Zabbix Academy, a new learning platform designed to empower IT professionals and monitoring enthusiasts with self-paced, expert-led training.

Zabbix Academy is the brainchild of Kristine Lamberte, Head of Training at Zabbix. Kristine was gracious enough to participate in a short interview where she shares the vision behind it, goes into detail about who it’s targeted at (spoiler alert – everyone!), and ruminates about the future of learning and development at Zabbix.

In the beginning: The vision behind Zabbix Academy

Was there anything in particular that inspired the creation of Zabbix Academy, and how does it fit into Zabbix’s long-term vision for community and professional development?

Zabbix itself is an extremely flexible tool, so we want to offer the same level of flexibility in our professional services. At that moment, we had enough variety in the training offer in terms of different courses for different experience levels, and we no doubt had (and still have) a great level of quality as well as theory and hands-on balance, so this was a natural next step in how we can offer even more for our users.

As for the long-term vision, Zabbix Academy supports the growth of the Zabbix ecosystem, it strengthens our training portfolio without replacing live courses, and it also demonstrates our ongoing investment in the community.

Do you see a primary audience for Zabbix Academy (beginners, professionals, enterprise clients, etc.) or is it meant to be universal?

We are ready to meet you at any stage of your Zabbix journey. The Academy has free quick-start guides in the form of free courses and webinars for those who are just starting, as well as a variety of courses on different levels – introduction, fundamental, intermediate, and advanced. And we will add new paid and free material on a regular basis for all levels.

The Zabbix Academy learning experience

How does Zabbix Academy go about keeping learning hands-on and practical for complicated monitoring scenarios?

All the people involved in the creation of training materials are Zabbix Certified Trainers and Zabbix Certified Experts with multiple years of experience. We have a deep understanding that no training material is complete without good-quality real-life use cases and practical tasks. So, it is natural that in Zabbix Academy, for all the paid courses, you will get not only high-quality theory, but also an option to do labs. Learners can experiment in a safe sandbox setting — so they’re not just reading about Zabbix, they’re actually using it.

Instructors and expertise

How do you ensure consistency and quality across so many different topics and courses?

Practice makes perfect, doesn’t it? It all comes down to the people who are behind the course creation. As I already mentioned, they are experienced Zabbix trainers and experts, but most importantly, they have hands-on experience with Zabbix.

But it is not only about our training content creators; we have close collaboration with other teams, for example, internally, support, developers, integrators, etc., and we also have extremely knowledgeable training partners who are very much involved in the review of new courses and suggestions for what’s coming.

Additionally, learner feedback plays a key role — we continuously refine and update materials based on real-world experience and community input.

Career impact

Can you give a hypothetical scenario of how Zabbix Academy could help an IT professional advance their career or an organization strengthen their monitoring practices?

Personally, I put more emphasis on what knowledge brings to the company. Knowing how to work smarter, more efficiently, use effective automations, troubleshoot faster, and come up with new ways of what and how to monitor is something that everyone should want for their business, and these things come with knowledge. What we offer is structured knowledge, packed and passed down to Zabbix users in the most effective way.

The future

What are your goals for the first year of Zabbix Academy, and how will you measure its success?

In the first year, it is crucial to continuously grow and shape Zabbix Academy. The measure of success? I mean, we created this platform for our users, so the measure of success is based on their satisfaction, engagement, and the impact this platform will have on their day-to-day tasks.

What future expansions or features can learners expect?

We aim to continuously expand the course catalogue, both free and paid content, and establish Zabbix Academy as a trusted source of knowledge for both new and existing users. In short, our goal is for Zabbix Academy to evolve into a dynamic, living resource that grows alongside Zabbix itself.

A final thought

From your perspective as Head of Training, what has been the most rewarding or challenging part of launching Zabbix Academy?

There were no challenges worth mentioning, but when it comes to the most rewarding thing, I can name a few.
First thing is that we established right from the beginning that Zabbix Academy will have all kinds of content, including free content. This once again supports our effort in strengthening our community.

Secondly, we did not compromise on the course quality; we took our classroom-quality courses and transformed them for the self-paced training.

But the most rewarding part has been seeing how excited our community is about Zabbix Academy. The feedback from early users and our partners has been overwhelmingly positive. That shows me that we are on the right track, and now we just need to keep on delivering things we are good at – great quality, hands-on content that allows Zabbix users to reach and exceed their monitoring goals.

Continue reading Building an “Academy of Uptime” with Kristine Lamberte →

Improving Customer Satisfaction and Experience with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/improving-customer-satisfaction-and-experience-with-zabbix/31692/

No matter what business you’re in, there is one universal truth – your success or failure depends on customer satisfaction and trust. And when your IT systems fail, it’s your customers who pay the price. Being unable to place an order due to unexpected downtime (which can cost a large organization as much as $9,000 per minute) or having their credit card data compromised in a preventable security breach (which costs the average organization nearly $5 million) will force even your most loyal customers to go somewhere else.

Monitoring with Zabbix doesn’t just keep your infrastructure safe, it keeps your reputation safe and makes sure that your customers continue to be your customers. It does this by guaranteeing the performance, reliability, and security of your digital services – while also supporting better customer service and continuous improvement. Keep reading to see how it’s possible.

Say goodbye to downtime

Your customers are looking to meet their needs quickly and effectively. Unexpected service disruptions cause them to feel neglected and force them to look elsewhere for solutions.
Monitoring your infrastructure with Zabbix can effectively eliminate downtime through proactive issue detection, which locates anomalies and performance issues like high CPU usage, packet loss, and latency in real time – before they have a chance to make life harder for customers.

If an issue does occur, Zabbix’s predictive alerting capabilities let your tech teams know about anything that could potentially impact an application or service, which lets them meet SLAs and provide a better, more reliable customer experience with fewer service disruptions, which in turns leads to higher levels of trust and satisfaction.

Outperform your competitors

No matter how good your products or services happen to be, you still need to provide smooth and fast online user experience if you want repeat use and positive reviews. Monitoring with Zabbix optimizes network traffic by helping you to identify bandwidth bottlenecks or misconfigured devices with a single glance at a dashboard, allowing better traffic management and a better online experience for customers.

It also improves response times, which allows you to be confident that your applications and services remain responsive. This is especially important for real-time services like video conferencing, e-commerce, or customer support.

Turn good customer service into outstanding customer service

What turns a casual, one-time user into a repeat customer? In most cases, it all comes down to making that user feel seen, informed, and supported. Zabbix helps you maintain consistent system performance, and nothing builds trust like stability.

With a bit of configuration and the help of IT service management tools like ServiceNow, Zabbix can provide clear, easy-to-access logs and metrics that help your customer service reps better understand your customers and the process of serving them, including:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Preferred communication channel
• Average ticket count
• Average response time
• Average ticket resolution time
• Ticket resolution rate
• Ticket backlog
• Interactions per ticket

With this information, your team will be able to communicate proactively when issues happen, giving customers accurate information about the issue and the expected resolution time.

Keep your customers safe from cyber threats

The consequences of a data breach are deep and far-reaching, and they include financial losses, reputational damage, legal troubles, regulatory fines, and a loss of customer trust. Despite a greater emphasis on data security, hackers are constantly finding new ways to gain access to valuable corporate data and credentials by combining next-generation AI technologies with long-established tools.

Monitoring with Zabbix gives IT and security teams the visibility and early warning systems they need to spot and react to potential threats. Zabbix continuously monitors systems, networks, and applications for predefined thresholds and anomalies, identifying possible network intrusions or misconfigurations and notifying the relevant security stakeholders.

On top of that, Zabbix can monitor any existing security tools your team runs, tracking antivirus software, firewalls, IDS/IPS tools, and endpoint protection solutions to make sure they are functioning properly and running the latest versions. It can also integrate with SIEM systems (like Splunk, ELK, or Wazuh) as well as custom scripts in order to provide extended security analytics.

Meet (and exceed) your SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a framework for managing the expectations of both customers and businesses. They define agreed-on standards of service, but tracking them is more than just a way to measure compliance – it’s a tool that you can use to improve your overall service delivery and operations.

With Zabbix, you can monitor any quantifiable metric that’s relevant to your SLAs, such as system uptime/downtime, response time, the availability of web services, databases, or network devices, transaction success and failure rates, and much more. In addition, Zabbix can use real-time data and built-in SLA calculation to automatically calculate current SLA compliance and send an alert if an SLA is at risk of being breached, by using triggers based on thresholds.

If you’d rather track the metrics on your own, no problem – by using Zabbix dashboards, you can visualize SLA compliance in real-time, with the dashboards showing availability percentages, event timelines, and breach summaries, while giving you easy-to-understand views of service health. The result is better products and services that are aligned with customer expectations.

Build a continuous improvement culture

When it’s time to roll out a new feature or upgrade, you naturally want to have ALL the necessary data at your fingertips. Monitoring usage patterns and performance metrics with Zabbix not only gives you advanced visualizations (forecasting, capacity planning insights, etc.) but can also highlight cases where data analysis led to tangible improvements.

Want more input from customers and users? Zabbix can make sure that the improvements to your product are community-driven by giving you the data you need to run regular user surveys and forums to gather product feedback. It can even help you publish a public roadmap with transparent prioritization based on community input.

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction is about a lot more than just good service – it’s also about consistency, reliability, and transparency. Zabbix empowers businesses to deliver all three by providing a comprehensive, proactive, and scalable monitoring solution.

That’s why customers in verticals as diverse as aerospace and education turn to Zabbix to keep them informed about what’s working – and what isn’t. By integrating Zabbix into your IT operations, you’re not just improving system performance – you’re actively investing in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Find out more about what Zabbix can do for you and your customers by taking a look at real-world case studies from companies like yours.

The post Improving Customer Satisfaction and Experience with Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Monitoring MDM Certificates with Lab9 Pro and Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/monitoring-mdm-certificates-with-lab9-pro-and-zabbix/31621/

Lab9 Pro is the B2B division of Lab9, Belgium’s leading Apple Premium Partner. With over 30 years of experience, Lab9 Pro specializes in integrating and supporting Apple systems within businesses, educational institutions, and public organizations. Beyond Apple expertise, Lab9 Pro also designs, implements, and maintains complete IT infrastructures, including networks, servers, storage, and security solutions.

The challenge

It’s impossible to manage devices at organizations without the use of a good MDM (Mobile Device Management) system such as Jamf. As the leading provider of Apple device management solutions, Jamf empowers organizations to deploy, manage, and secure Apple devices at scale.

Even in smaller organizations Jamf is the right solution, as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack the resources to manage their MDM systems. Offering an MSP model solves a lot of problems for these customers.

For Apple device management, the typical customer has a few certificates issued by Apple, which require approval of the user agreement by the Apple business or school manager. Without getting too technical about Apple Device management, depending on the customer the certificates need to be renewed on different dates. If the user agreement is not approved, automated device enrollment will stop working.

Lab9 Pro found themselves needing to check all certificates and user agreements for MSP customers manually, which involved an unacceptably high error rate that often caused discontinuity of the MDM system.

The solution

Lab9 Pro were already using Zabbix to monitor customer environments and their own infrastructure, including storage, firewalls, switches, and more. Because Zabbix offers a wide variety of options that make it possible to monitor almost anything, it was only logical to explore whether Zabbix could also be used to monitor the MDM certificates.

The research phase

Step one was to check the availability of certificate information. Unfortunately, Apple Business Manager’s API did not help much, as it does not provide certificate details. Instead, the team at Lab9 Pro investigated the Jamf API.

Although it doesn’t directly return certificate information either,  they found something even more useful – Jamf’s API provides customer instance notifications. These include alerts when certificates (VPP, PUSH, DEP, etc.) are about to expire (typically 10 days in advance) as well as when the Device Enrollment Program (user agreement) is not approved.

Zabbix implementation

Since Lab9 Pro manages multiple MSP tenants, they created a dedicated Zabbix template. This template includes both pre-filled and empty macros:

Pre-filled macros:

• {$JAMF.AUTH.INTERVAL}: Interval for retrieving the bearer token
• {$JAMF.NOTIF.INTERVAL}: Interval for retrieving Jamf notifications
• {$JAMF.PATH.AUTH}: API path for retrieving the bearer token
• {$JAMF.PATH.NOTIFICATIONS}: API path for retrieving Jamf notifications

Empty macros:

• {$JAMF.URL}: Jamf URL
• {$JAMF.API.USER}: Jamf user account for authentication
• {$JAMF.API.PASSWORD}: Jamf password (stored as a secret value)

The team configured an item to perform an API call to retrieve the bearer token. A preprocessing rule in JavaScript stores this token in a variable. Discovery rules proved very useful for executing API calls to retrieve Jamf notifications using the bearer token. This was achieved by configuring preprocessing steps and Low-Level Discovery (LLD) macros to pass the Jamf URL and bearer token. Trigger prototypes for each certificate were also added within the same discovery rule.

The results

Whenever a certificate is nearing expiration, a problem is automatically displayed on Lab9 Pro’s Zabbix dashboard, which is visible on TV screens placed throughout their office in order to make sure the entire team is aware of upcoming certificate renewals.

Since Lab9 Pro began monitoring MDM certificates through the Jamf API, they have experienced zero expired certificates, which in turn has allowed them to avoid situations where devices become unmanaged and require a full setup again.

Zabbix makes it possible for Lab9 Pro to keep their clients’ MDM systems operational, while allowing them to either proactively inform them when certificates need to be renewed or handle the renewal process on their behalf.

The post Monitoring MDM Certificates with Lab9 Pro and Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Community, Coffee, and Code: A Zabbix Summit 2025 Recap

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/community-coffee-and-code-a-zabbix-summit-2025-recap/31577/

Zabbix Summit 2025 is officially in the history books, so now is the perfect time for a casual, behind‑the‑scenes run‑through of what went down. If you were there, this should ring a few bells (or spark some “oh hey, I forgot about that” moments). If you couldn’t make it, consider this your own personal highlight reel!

Featuring approximately 550 attendees from 42 countries, the Summit took place from October 8-10 at the Radisson Blu Hotel Latvija in the heart of downtown Riga. The 13th in-person version of our premier yearly event was in many ways our biggest and boldest yet, and it included keynote sessions, two parallel tracks (including a developer track), workshops, hands-on sessions, training and certification exams, and a variety of evening social and networking events.

Open source, open house

On October 8, we welcomed nearly 100 guests to our brand-new headquarters for Zabbix Summit 2025’s Open House Day. The new facility gave us plenty of space to host everyone, and visitors got to explore our new HQ, take part in a fun quiz with Zabbix facts, and catch up with longtime colleagues while meeting new ones from the community and the Zabbix team.

Day 1: Looking ahead 

The Summit officially kicked off with Zabbix Founder and CEO Alexei Vladishev’s keynote address, entitled “Zabbix 8.0: A New Chapter in Monitoring.” The address laid out in detail what’s around the corner for Zabbix, including:

  • Zabbix Academy – a new learning hub with self-paced, expert-built courses to boost Zabbix skills anytime and from anywhere.
  • Zabbix France – Zabbix is acquiring IZI-IT and opening a new office in France to provide localized support and closer collaboration with French clients and partners.
  • Zabbix Cloud – a host of new features, including automatic upgrades and backups, plus predictable pricing and simplified user management.
  • Zabbix 8.0 LTS (coming in 2026) – a major leap forward with APM and OpenTelemetry for end-to-end visibility, Complex Event Processing (CEP) and AI-based correlation, plus new UI & visualizations for a smoother experience.
  • Zabbix Mobile App – coming with 8.0 LTS for iOS & Android, the app will offer instant push notifications, issue management, collaboration, seamless connection with Zabbix Cloud, and multi-server views in your pocket.
  • Zabbix Marketplace (2026) – A new global space to connect Zabbix users with vendor and partner solutions, Zabbix Marketplace will extend the power of Zabbix beyond our core product.

Next up was initMAX Founder and CEO Tomáš Heřmánek, who showed how to turn physical sensor data from analog inputs into Zabbix metrics with budget hardware and integrations, complete with templates and triggers.

Another crowd-pleasing session reached the audience thanks to Richard Germanus of CANCOM, who shared the story of how CANCOM consolidated six monitoring systems into one, managing approximately 30,000 hosts, deploying 162 Zabbix proxies, standardizing templates, integrating Power BI for dashboards, automating with APIs, and offering monitoring-as-a-service.

Shortly thereafter, a lightning talk by SEB Bank’s Giedrius Stasiulionis explored “Monitoring Sounds with Zabbix” – in other words, converting audio and sound waves into meaningful metrics, a fresh and inventive notion.

The day’s other lightning talk, “Monitor Your Nearby Areas and Events with Zabbix” by longtime Summit fixture and Zabbix superfan Janne Pikkarainen, showed how anyone can use Zabbix to centralize event data like train timetables, traffic patterns, or cinema showtimes.

Developer track: Something for everyone

Meanwhile, the Summit Developer track was full of special sessions for builders and extension authors, such as “Extend Zabbix Agent 2 with Your Plugin”, which saw Senior Golang Developer Eriks Sneiders show an appreciative audience how Zabbix agent 2’s plugin architecture works, how to use existing plugins, and how to build brand-new custom ones.

Other topics in the Developer track included template design, advanced scripting, API tips, and internal tooling, giving Zabbix techies some food for thought and hopefully sparking a batch of fresh ideas!

Day 2: Showing the big picture

After a long first day and night, Zabbix Summit 2025’s special guest Dylan Beattie made some noise and woke everyone up with a talk entitled “Open Source, Open Mind: The Cost of Free Software.”

Dylan took the Summit audience on a journey through the history and philosophy of free and open source software, touching on questions about licensing issues, looking at the motivations of developers, discussing edge cases and challenges, and asking whether truly sustainable open-source ecosystems can exist.

Later, Inqbeo Founder Christian Anton shared a system in which a central Zabbix instance serves multiple tenants, with the architecture leveraging Kafka to stream metric data partitioned per tenant, storing results in S3 (in Prometheus format), and visualizing via Grafana. This enables isolation and the creation of custom dashboards.

Other main-stage sessions tackled topics like scaling Zabbix, managing large datasets, tag and template strategies, and AI/automation in monitoring.

Connecting people with the Community track

Zabbix Summit 2025 also introduced a Community track, a dedicated space at Zabbix where users, enthusiasts, and contributors could share ideas and shape the future of Zabbix. Instead of deeply technical or development-level presentations, this track focused on community-driven topics like integrations, templates, connectors, media types, and open resources.

A key highlight was the “Zabbix Book Breakout Room”, led by Alexei Vladishev himself along with longtime community members Patrik Uytterhoeven, Brian van Baekel, and Nathan Liefting. Zabbix users were able to brainstorm ideas for new chapters, missing topics, translations, and community contributions to the online Zabbix Book.

Turning ideas into action

Day 2 was also full of hands-on workshops, including a fascinating one from the team at initMAX that was based on their day 1 presentation. Participants got kits with an ESP32 board, a camera, a 3D-printed counter mount, and a few other odds and ends. They were then guided step-by-step as they integrated the device into Zabbix, built monitoring scenarios, and used AI models to interpret camera images.

Meanwhile, the Summit also hosted training and certification exams before, during, and after the main event. Attendees could take courses like Automation & Integration with API, Database Monitoring, SNMP Monitoring, and level-up exams (Specialist and Professional) at discounted rates.

A different kind of networking

One of the things that makes the Zabbix Summit experience so special is the depth of the networking experience – there’s no awkward small talk or simple business card exchanges here, but rather a series of real connections made, deals closed, and new partnerships cemented.

Accordingly, a lot of the magic at Zabbix Summit 2025 happened after hours, with everyone gathering at Riga’s famed Monkey Club for the Summit Welcome Event on October 8 to enjoy a lively atmosphere, a wide selection of cocktails, and plenty of opportunities to connect with fellow monitoring and observability enthusiasts.

October 9’s Main Event took place in the Tallinn Quarter Angārs, which blended concert hall energy with an open-plan street food kitchen and bar that gave everyone plenty of room to mingle.

A special treat was provided in the form of an original Zabbix-related song by Zabbix PHP Developer and part-time rock star Vladimirs Maksimovs, which got the entire crowd on its feet and set the tone for an unforgettable evening.

In what has become a bit of a tradition within a tradition, the Summit officially wrapped up on October 10 at Riga’s Burzma Food Hall, with its relaxed atmosphere, multiple cuisines, and communal tables. It’s proven to be the perfect place for reflecting on Summit highlights, swapping contact info, or plotting collaborations.

Thank you to our sponsors!

We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all the sponsors of Zabbix Summit 2025, whose commitment not only helped us bring everyone together under one roof but also contributed to the growth of both Zabbix and the entire global monitoring ecosystem. We value your partnership and look forward to working with you for many years to come!

Thanks again to our sponsors and everyone else who helped make Zabbix Summit 2025 possible!

In case you couldn’t make it…

If you didn’t manage to make the trip, you can still enjoy the Summit atmosphere in the privacy of your own home! Recordings of both days are available on Zabbix’s YouTube channel:

Zabbix Summit 2025 Day 1 

Zabbix Summit 2025 Day 2 

The slides and texts of the presentations are also available here.

And that’s a wrap on Zabbix Summit 2025! From mind-blowing tech talks to caffeinated hallway chats and everything in between, this year’s Summit experience delivered. Whether you came for the deep dives or just the cool merch (no shame in that), we hope you went away inspired, connected, and maybe just a little more obsessed with monitoring and observability than before. See you in 2026!

The post Community, Coffee, and Code: A Zabbix Summit 2025 Recap appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Optimizing Financial Routines and Infrastructure with Banpará

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/optimizing-financial-routines-and-infrastructure-with-banpara/30815/

Banco do Estado do Pará (Banpará) is the main public financial institution in the Brazilian state of Pará. It is a mixed-capital company, organized as a multiple bank with the mission of generating value for the state of Pará. It currently has approximately 198 physical customer service units and is present in all 144 municipalities in the state.

The challenge

Until 2016, Banpará used a monitoring environment installed on a single physical server. This environment was centralized, not very scalable, and vulnerable due to the lack of updates to recent versions of the software used. Centralization created a critical dependency – if there was a server failure, the entire monitoring system would be compromised.

There was no integration with the tool that orchestrates the company’s routine activities (which also generated an alert and a need for proper support of the bank’s infrastructure) and there was also the issue of including the routines of the internal demand generation tool in the monitoring panel, which was done manually.

With each new routine created, it was necessary to open calls with the technical teams for inclusion in the monitoring plan, which were then entered into a list of tasks. This process, in addition to being time-consuming, was subject to human error and delays, which compromised real-time visibility of critical operations.

The lack of proactive and integrated monitoring in Banpará’s structure resulted in operational gaps that created real risks to the continuous functioning of banking operations.

The solution

Given the challenges posed, the project developed with Zabbix had as its main objective to recreate the monitoring environment in a virtualized, scalable and resilient way, without dependence on a physical server. From rebuilding the infrastructure to integrating it with critical banking systems, the primary requirements included the following:

  • Integration with existing systems
  • Intelligent data processing and analysis
  • Reduction of manual processes and operational dependency
  • Development of customized solutions
  • Reorganization of the technological infrastructure

After implementing and structuring Zabbix at the bank (with the help of Master Support, an official Zabbix Certified Partner in Brazil), the structure became modular, scalable, and resilient, aligned with best practices, and able to expand monitoring without compromising system performance as the bank integrated new routines and services.

The results

The modernization of monitoring environment with Zabbix brought immediate benefits for Banpará’s IT monitoring scenario, especially with regard to operational efficiency, reliability and process automation:

  • More than 2,000 monitored devices
  • Around 100,000 metrics collected
  • More than 26,000 active alerts in Zabbix
  • Automated coverage of around 2,300 routines
  • An estimated gain of 2,300 operational hours

The adoption of Zabbix as a monitoring tool at Banpará was a practical response to the need to modernize the bank’s IT infrastructure. The project contributed to the elimination of manual processes, reduction of operational time, and increased visibility over critical routines. It also enabled the monitoring of a greater number of services, with greater agility in identifying failures and supporting decision-making.

In conclusion

With the current structure, Banpará now has a more integrated monitoring system, adjusted to operational demands and with the capacity to monitor the evolution of the bank’s activities in an organized and secure manner.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in banking and finance, visit our website.

The post Optimizing Financial Routines and Infrastructure with Banpará appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Exploring the Human Side of Software with Dylan Beatty

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/exploring-the-human-side-of-software-with-dylan-beatty/31320/

There are plenty of good reasons to attend Zabbix Summit 2025, but one of the most important is the fact that this year’s Summit will feature Dylan Beattie as a special guest speaker. A Software Development Consultant and Founder of Ursatile, Dylan is an international keynote speaker, and a long-time contributor to the open-source community. He’s also a Microsoft MVP and has created Rockstar, an esoteric programming language that started as an inside joke and ended up being featured in Classic Rock magazine.

At the Summit, Dylan will give a talk titled “Open Source, Open Minds. The Cost of Free Software.” We asked him about his beginnings in the tech industry, what drove the creation of Rockstar, and why communication is the key to successful software development.

Can you tell us a bit about your journey into software development? How did you get started, and was there any particular moment when you realized that you were on the right path?

Like a lot of folks in tech, I got started on the 8-bit home computers of the 1980s – mine was an Amstrad 6128, which came with a couple of fairly mediocre games, but it also had a BASIC and a LOGO interpreter, and I pretty quickly found out that writing little programs and trying to create my own games was way more fun than playing the games which were included with it. I graduated from that to a 286 PC with MS—DOS 5, Windows 3.1 – but I really wasn’t thinking about it as a career.

The turning point was when I was sixteen years old, and I was supposed to be going to university to study mathematics. Dad brought home a new 486 PC a couple of weeks before my final exams, I spent my study leave messing around on the computer instead of studying, and when I didn’t get the grades I needed for my university course I figured maybe that was a sign I should be studying computer science instead. I went to Southampton and got a bachelor’s degree in computer science, learned C, C++, Lisp, SQL, and HTML. I graduated right as the dot-com bubble was bursting but still managed to get a job building data-driven web applications, and I’ve never really looked back.

You talk a lot about the human side of software. Why do you think communication is such a critical skill in development?

One of the perennial challenges facing the craft of programming is that it can be a profoundly solitary activity. One person working on their own can create an app or a game, put it online, and share their creation with literally millions of people – no meetings, no emails, just one person cranking out code. But then you try to translate those coding skills into domains like banking, healthcare, aviation, domains where software quality can have a real, material effect on people’s lives, and you realize that the code is actually the easy part.

The ability to talk to people, figure out what they need, help them understand your own ideas; to create consensus and avoid misunderstanding? It’s way more important than being able to crank out code. The most expensive problems I’ve had to deal with in my career haven’t been bugs in the code, they’ve been misunderstandings about what the team is doing and why it matters.

How did you end up creating a programming language (Rockstar) that can do double-duty as rock lyrics?

Good question! So, there’s always been this trope of the “rockstar programmer” – these mythical, high-powered, hyper-productive developers who can crank out millions of lines of fast, flawless code – and about a decade ago there was a massive spike in recruiters putting out adverts for “rockstar programmers.” When somebody suggested on Twitter that somebody should create a programming language called Rockstar to really confuse recruiters, that gave me an idea.

Initially it was just a piece of comedy writing – a parody of a programming language specification. I wanted to see if it was possible to extract enough clichés from rock music to create a formal grammar for a Turing-complete programming language that read exactly like song lyrics. It turns out that the answer is yes! I published the parody spec on GitHub, it got shared on Reddit and Hacker News, and the whole thing snowballed from there. Eventually I had no choice but to actually build a Rockstar interpreter, which turned out to be way more difficult than I thought, but also a lot of fun. The latest version is online here  – it’s built in C#, compiles to native binaries for WIndows, Linux, and macOS, plus there’s a web assembly version on the website so curious folks can run Rockstar right in their browser without having to download anything!

Before taking on a speaking slot at this year’s Summit, how familiar were you with Zabbix? What has your experience of using it been like?

I’ve got to be honest – I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Zabbix before I was invited to speak at Zabbix Summit 2025, but that’s not unusual. I get invited to a lot of events that are focused around a particular technology or platform, and it’s a constant reminder of just how vast our industry is that somebody will organize a conference around a product I’ve never even heard of and attract literally hundreds of smart, curious people who want to share their own experiences and learn from each other. One thing about Zabbix which was particularly interesting to me when I started researching it was the licensing model. I think it’s a relatively unusual example of a commercially sustainable product or software that’s published under the Affero GPL license, so I’m really looking forward to chatting with other attendees about that and how that’s influenced their decision to use it.

You’re famous for your detailed and theatrical presentations – what makes a technical talk memorable to you?

A great talk is one that really connects with an audience, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to look for the little things that we all do every day that we’ve all learned just accept at face value, even when we have no idea why they work that way. Why is a capital “A” ASCII code 65 but a lowercase “a” is code 97? Why is validating email addresses difficult? Why is vertically aligning something in CSS such a big deal? There’s a good chance that a lot of folks in the audience have asked themselves that same question at some point, so the curiosity is already there. Tapping into that curiosity gets their attention, and then you can tell them the good stuff: the history, the stories, the personalities, the decisions.

There’s a lot of stuff in tech which feels kinda stupid, but none of it was designed to be stupid (well, except Rockstar!) Once you understand the context and the history, everything makes a lot more sense – and then at some point, maybe months later, you’ll hit a weird text encoding bug, or a problem with a system that won’t accept certain kinds of email addresses, and you’ll remember the talk. I get email from folks sometimes talking about how something from one of my presentations has helped them fix a weird bug years after they saw the presentation. That’s a great feeling.

Can you drop any hints about your presentation at this year’s Summit? What should audience members expect?

Sure! We’re going to talk about MIT, laser printers, software, Commander Keen, Doom, Quake, Netscape, the origins of the term “open source”, Linksys routers, WordPress, how the xz-utils backdoor nearly ended up compromising about half the computers on the internet – and a really cute story about a squirrel. It’s going to be awesome. I can’t wait!

 

The post Exploring the Human Side of Software with Dylan Beatty appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Expand your Knowledge at Zabbix Summit 2025

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/expand-your-knowledge-at-zabbix-summit-2025/31168/

October is just around the corner, and that annual shift into Q4 can mean only one thing – it’s almost Summit time! Zabbix Summit 2025 will take place on October 8-10 in Riga, Latvia at the Radisson Blu Hotel Latvija, and it’s shaping up to be the perfect blend of established traditions and fresh approaches – we’ve been at this for a (very lucky) 13 years now, and we’d like to think we’ve kept the aspects of the Summit experience that everyone knows and loves while adding a few twists! Here’s what you can expect for the price of admission:

Top-tier presentations from Zabbix leaders and experts

The learning begins with Zabbix Founder and CEO Alexei Vladishev’s keynote speech, which promises to be an “info drop” full of details about upcoming releases, new features, and what Alexei sees on the horizon for Zabbix. From there, it will be time for over 30 main stage speakers spread across two days of conference action. Some of the highlights include:

Presentations from Zabbix experts on topics like:

  • Turning playbooks into automated action plans
  • Streaming metrics for multiple tenants without chaos
  • Syncing systems painlessly
  • Maintaining control over massive amounts of Zabbix data
  • Detecting and responding to security threats before they escalate

Deep dives that will show you how to:

  • Spot the blind spots in large-scale networks (and fix them)
  • Keep tabs on Zabbix itself (after all, even monitoring needs monitoring)
  • Take full control of tag management
  • Use Zabbix Proxy to scale without breaking a sweat

Practical case studies, including:

  • Turning sensor data into insights with AI
  • Keeping SAP environments and multisite clusters in check
  • Transforming enterprise-level monitoring
  • Supercharging operations via migration projects
  • Making discovery, correlation, and AI work together for smart monitoring in action

Expect all this, plus inside information from the Zabbix team on the path to becoming a Zabbix partner and how Zabbix services can help you scale efficiently. As if that weren’t enough, this year’s Summit will also feature special guest Dylan Beattie! A Software Development Consultant and Founder of Ursatile, Dylan is an international keynote speaker, and a long-time contributor to the open-source community.

At the Summit, Dylan will give a talk titled “Open Source, Open Minds. The Cost of Free Software.” Expect stories about why developers choose to give their code away, what happens when they change their minds, the quirks of licenses and legalities, and the big question of whether open source can ever be truly sustainable.

Dedicated Dev and Community tracks

Created by developers and for developers, the Dev Track makes its debut this year and brings together some of the top minds on the Zabbix development team to cover topics as diverse as extending Zabbix Agent 2 with custom plugins, enhanced widget development, and template design best practices.

For attendees of a slightly less technical persuasion, the Community Track is there to facilitate author led discussions about community-driven content and resources, like the Zabbix Book. Assembled by longtime Zabbix enthusiasts Patrik Uytterhoeven, Brian van Baekel, and Nathan Liefting, the Zabbix Book will get its own breakout room, where Summit attendees can brainstorm in small groups about how to improve the book via new ideas and topics.

Hands-on workshops

The Summit experience has always been about finding opportunities to put theory into practice, and this year’s workshops showcase the latest features and use cases in action. Attendees will be able to dive into workshops on AI powered monitoring with Zabbix and ESP32, nested LLDs (low-level discovery), reducing alert noise, diagnosing performance issues with Diaginfo, and using Netflow integration via H5 Network. It’s a rare opportunity to confirm your knowledge retention by performing real-world tasks under the guidance of workshop hosts and their assistants.

Training and certification (yes, with discounts!)

A Zabbix Summit is the perfect place to get recognized as a Zabbix specialist or professional by taking part in Zabbix Certified Training sessions and exams at bargain prices. These one-day courses will be held from October 6 through October 13:

  • Automation and Integration with Zabbix API
  • Advanced Zabbix Database Monitoring
  • Advanced Zabbix SNMP Monitoring
  • Zabbix Certified Specialist Upgrade
  • Zabbix Certified Professional Upgrade

If you find yourself in Riga after the Summit, it’s worth your time to take part in the full Zabbix Certified Specialist course scheduled for October 13-17. Please remember that you can choose more than one training course and also keep in mind that you can attend the courses (without the 50% Summit discount) even if you’re not joining us at the Summit. You can register for all training sessions and exams here.

Networking and community building

 

A big part of what makes a Zabbix Summit a Zabbix Summit is the vibe – a big, global community coming together to catch up with old friends, welcome new members, and celebrate a certain open-source monitoring solution that brings us all together. That atmosphere of conviviality is exactly what makes a Summit such a one-of-a-kind networking opportunity. We’ve put together an open house visit and three evening events that are the ideal places to connect with like-minded monitoring enthusiasts, show off your skills, or get your company’s name in front of industry decision-makers.

This year’s Zabbix Open House on October 8 is your chance to see where the magic happens – drop by our offices and chat with our team members, grab yourself a coffee in our kitchen, and take part in a quiz that will teach even the most seasoned Zabbix fans a few new fun facts.

No summit would be complete without its events, and the opening event of Zabbix Summit 2025 on October 8 will take place at Riga’s renowned Monkey Club, with delicious fusion cuisine, a broad selection of cocktails and beverages, and a chance to unwind in style with your fellow Summit attendees.

The main event on October 9 is hosted by the Tallinn Quarter Hangar, which boasts a concert hall as well as a modern, open-plan street food kitchen and bar that are guaranteed to offer something for everyone.

On October 10, Zabbix Summit 2025 will wrap up at downtown Riga’s Burzma food hall, which offers 10 restaurants and a bar serving up a broad range of flavors from every corner of the globe. It’s the perfect location to relive Summit highlights in the company of your fellow Zabbix enthusiasts, and we’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Can’t make it? There’s always YouTube

A Zabbix Summit is one of those “you had to be there” events, but if you can’t make it to Riga, no worries – as in previous years, we’re going to be livestreaming all the speeches on our YouTube channel! Find out more and subscribe to the livestream here.

The post Expand your Knowledge at Zabbix Summit 2025 appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Zabbix at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-at-the-zhongnan-university-of-economics-and-law/30949/

Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (ZUEL), located in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, is a key university with two campuses – Nanhu and Shouyi. The school boasts over 20,000 full-time undergraduate students, more than 8,800 graduate students, and over 2,500 faculty and staff members. ZUEL enjoys an outstanding reputation in the fields of law and economics, with four national key disciplines. Its law discipline, meanwhile, has been included in the list of national “Double First-Class” disciplines.

The challenge

As the information infrastructure at ZUEL continues to expand, the scale of the university’s IT infrastructure has rapidly grown to encompass power systems, dynamic environmental systems, servers, network devices, security appliances, storage systems, virtualization platforms, operating systems, databases, data lakes, and campus application systems.

At the same time, the daily academic and administrative activities of faculty and students increasingly demand higher levels of stability and reliability from information systems. To ensure the efficient operation of these systems, the Information Management department needed a monitoring and management system that could cover the entire university’s IT resources and address the growing complexities of operational maintenance.

The university found that traditional monitoring and management systems often fall short when faced with such large-scale and diverse monitoring demands, revealing problems like insufficient monitoring points, poor real-time capabilities, and limited scalability. To address these challenges, the university decided to adopt Zabbix 7.0 and develop a custom IP Radar platform to further meet its refined operational maintenance needs.

The solution

When combined with Zabbix 7.0, the IP Radar system can achieve comprehensive monitoring and management of the university’s entire IT infrastructure through the integrated application of multiple monitoring protocols and technologies. Specifically, the system collects data and performs monitoring with the help of the following core technologies:

  • Zabbix 7.0. As an enterprise-level open-source monitoring platform renowned for its robust data collection and analysis capabilities, Zabbix enhances the system’s high availability, supporting large-scale concurrent processing to make sure that the monitoring system remains stable and delivers uninterrupted service even under heavy loads.
  • Parallel monitoring with multiple protocols. The system collects data through a variety of protocols, including Agent, SNMP, IPMI, MODBUS, MQTT, and more, enabling the real-time monitoring of a wide variety of IT hardware.
  • High-availability design. To accommodate the monitoring demands of massive devices and thousands of users, the Zabbix 7.0 platform supports multi-node deployment and redundancy design, enabling load balancing and failover among proxy servers. Even in the event of a node failure, the system maintains uninterrupted monitoring services, and it’s also equipped with an automated fault alerting and repair mechanism.
  • The self-developed IP Radar platform. To meet a demanding set of operation and maintenance management needs, ZUEL has developed the IP Radar system based on the Zabbix 7.0 platform, further customizing its business monitoring capabilities. IP Radar not only conducts real-time monitoring of the IT infrastructure, but it also provides detailed performance analysis reports and trend predictions, while integrating behavior monitoring capabilities to enhance the school’s network security management.

The IP Radar platform itself contains a variety of unique and innovative features, including:

  • Comprehensive monitoring coverage. The IP Radar system monitors over a million items – everything from hardware devices to application systems, affecting everything from network performance to user experience. This extensive coverage gives the Information Management department to a comprehensive understanding of the operational status of the school’s IT resources while providing sufficient data support for troubleshooting and performance optimization.
  • Customized monitoring strategies. Compared to traditional monitoring systems, IP Radar offers highly customized monitoring strategies. ZUEL can tailor different business dashboards for networks, computing resources, user experience, data center environments, and more, based on its own needs and the permissions granted to operation and maintenance personnel. Depending on different monitoring thresholds and alerting strategies, the system can automatically generate alerts and notify relevant personnel through enterprise WeChat, SMS, and other channels.
  • Intelligent alerting and automated handling. The intelligent alerting system of the IP Radar platform leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze historical monitoring data, enabling it to predict potential fault risks and issue early warnings. At the same time, the system integrates automated operation and maintenance capabilities, which allow it to automatically execute predetermined repair operations when certain common faults occur, reducing the time and cost of manual intervention.
  • Network security monitoring. In terms of network security, the IP Radar system is capable of identifying abnormal traffic patterns and promptly detecting potential security threats through real-time analysis of the school’s entire network traffic. The system also supports the monitoring of online behavior to ensure that network access activities comply with the school’s security policies.

The results

After implementing the Zabbix-based system, ZUEL was able to measure a wide range of monitoring performance improvements, including:

  • Improved operational and maintenance efficiency. Through the IP Radar system, the school’s Information Management department has been able to monitor the operational status of over 28,000 hosts in real-time, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. The system’s automated fault handling capabilities reduce the complexity of manual operations, allowing operations and maintenance personnel to focus on addressing only the complex issues that the system is unable to resolve automatically. At the same time, the system’s intelligent alerting feature enables the early detection of potential problems, preventing sudden failures.
  • Enhancing system stability and reliability. The high availability design of Zabbix 7.0 ensures that the system remains stable even under heavy loads. Its redundant design and automatic failover mechanisms guarantee the reliability of the system, and the trend analysis functionality provided by IP Radar helps administrators to identify factors that may affect system stability in advance and making corresponding adjustments, enhancing the overall reliability of the IT system in the process.
  • Advancing detailed information management. The IP Radar platform lets schools manage multiple IT resources with greater precision. The system not only monitors the operational status of hardware devices, but it also analyzes the performance of business systems, helping administrators to optimize system configurations and enhancing user experiences. During project development, historical data from the monitoring platform serves as an essential basis for decision-making. In the acceptance phase, the monitoring platform provides evaluation reference data for operational efficiency and stability.

The IP Radar monitoring and management system developed by ZUEL and based on Zabbix 7.0 has become the largest, most widely used, and most effective (in terms of the volume of monitored data) in the Chinese education sector. The successful implementation of this system not only provides strong support for the school’s information management, but it also offers valuable references for information operation and maintenance at other universities.

In conclusion

Looking ahead, the IP Radar system is poised to expand its functionalities further by integrating more intelligent operation and maintenance management tools. Through the introduction of emerging technologies such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence, the system will achieve more breakthroughs in areas like automated operation and maintenance as well as intelligent fault prediction, providing even more comprehensive technical support for the university’s information management.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for educational institutions, visit our website.

 

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Reducing Alert Fatigue with Zabbix and China Pacific Insurance

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/reducing-alert-fatigue-with-zabbix-and-china-pacific-insurance/30913/

Headquartered in Shanghai, the China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co., Ltd. (CPI) is a Chinese insurance company that was established on the basis of the former China Pacific Insurance Corporation. CPI Group is the second largest property insurance company and the third largest life insurance company in Mainland China. It provides integrated insurance services (including life insurance, property insurance, and reinsurance) through its subsidiaries.

The challenge:

The overall data center operation structure of the company works along financial industry lines, with a two-site, three-center operation model. The total scale of China Pacific Insurance’s on-premises hosts is over 6,000, and the three centers add up to nearly 40,000 host devices in the production environment.

It’s an enormous amount of information to monitor, so any monitoring solution needs to significantly reduce the difficulty of overall alert analysis. The alert information provided by the mixture of cloud product components that CPI were using caused a serious case of alert fatigue for their operations and maintenance personnel, with some alerts taking as long as 4 months to process.

The solution:

The bank’s cloud platforms all had their own monitoring and alerting functions, but the configuration of value threshold and notification policies was not flexible enough. Zabbix’s ability to uniformly collect data while configuring triggers and alerting proved to be a game-changer.

In addition, when compared to cloud vendors whose solutions require adjustments to thresholds in each product component, Zabbix proved to be a much simpler and more cost-effective way to notify operators of only the most essential alerts.

The results:

In practice, CPI found that the Zabbix multi-index combined alert function eliminates 30% of invalid alerts. Thanks to this success, CPI now plans to transfer the Zabbix Data Transmission Service to their digital twin data center, so that the inspection of physical facilities and the impact analysis of the application system can be quickly displayed to their operations and maintenance personnel.

Conclusion

The team at China Pacific Insurance successfully built an intelligent operation and maintenance system covering a number of key modules such as automated operation and maintenance, intelligent monitoring, logging platforms, and container platforms – all with Zabbix at the core. They are currently exploring the cutting-edge integration of monitoring systems with LLMs, further advancing intelligent monitoring and observability solutions in the process.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in banking and finance, visit our website.

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Keeping Latvia Connected with Zabbix and LMT

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/keeping-latvia-connected-with-zabbix-and-lmt/30834/

LMT is a mobile GSM/UMTS/LTE operator in Latvia. Founded on January 2, 1992, it was the first mobile network operator in the country. In addition to providing mobile network and ISP services, LMT uses innovative technologies and solutions to develop and maintain a variety of IT solutions for public and private organizations. Currently, LMT is the largest telecommunications service provider in the country, with over 1,660 base stations and over 1.5 million users as of 2024.

The challenge

LMT utilizes a variety of monitoring solutions for a variety of purposes – from tools performing and monitoring ping responses to vendor-specific solutions and all-in-one tools such as Zabbix. LMT has 2 data centers, and since the vast majority of services delivered by LMT can be considered critical, most of the relevant infrastructure is duplicated across them.

Multiple Zabbix instances are used in the environment, including Zabbix 5.0 with MySQL database backend, Zabbix 7.0 with PostgreSQL, and TimescaleDB. Over 3,000 hosts with approximately 500,000 items are monitored by Zabbix.

The solution

Here is one example of how Zabbix is used to monitor switch cabinets in LMT data centers. Switch cabinets contain devices to measure the electric current, which support Modbus protocol and which can in turn be used to collect data.

Modbus monitoring was achieved by using Zabbix agent2 with the official Modbus plugin. This was combined with NetBox and GraphQL. NetBox was used as the source of truth, providing information about power feed and various electrical characteristics, such as voltage, amperage, utilization, phase, and more. The data was collected from NetBox via HTTP agent checks and GraphQL, and a JSON result was created by utilizing Zabbix preprocessing features.

The information collected from NetBox is combined with Modbus data collection utilizing Zabbix agent2. The data collected by Zabbix agent2 is preprocessed after the collection. The collected data is normalized and used by Zabbix low-level discovery features to automatically create Zabbix items and triggers for the available resources. Finally, the resulting data is visualized on Zabbix dashboards.

The results

Monitoring with Zabbix has made reacting to changes in the monitored power feed (detecting spikes, observing gradual power feed changes, etc.) a much simpler proposition for LMT, which in turn improves service for its millions of users.

In conclusion

Zabbix has proven itself to be an ideal solution for telecommunications clients, making it easier than ever to keep track of network health and performance, driving a more positive customer experience and greater revenue growth in the process.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in telecommunications, get in touch with us.

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Transforming IT Infrastructure Visibility at Doğan Trend Automotive

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/transforming-it-infrastructure-visibility-at-dogan-trend-automotive/30715/

Established in 2020 to consolidate Doğan Group’s automotive and mobility companies and brands under a single entity, Doğan Trend Automotive is a prominent player in their industry. Representing a diverse portfolio ranging from automobiles, motorcycles, and marine engines to electric commercial vehicles, Doğan Trend also delivers innovative solutions to customers through its e-commerce platforms, such as suvmarket.com and vespastoreturkey.com.

The challenge

Doğan Trend’s IT ecosystem spans data centers, remote locations, and multiple units, necessitating seamless operations as well as an efficient monitoring and alert system. The existing infrastructure posed challenges in monitoring, making it difficult to detect potential issues in a timely manner, thus increasing operational risks.

The solution

To address Doğan Trend’s needs, our associates at ASNSKY implemented a Zabbix-based monitoring system. Key highlights of the project included:

  • Centralized dashboards: Custom dashboards were designed for data centers and remote locations, enabling the unified monitoring of IT locations and components from a single interface.
  • A dynamic alert system: Alerts prioritized based on predefined conditions allowed for the swift and effective resolution of critical issues.
  • Seamless operations: Early detection of potential issues prevented operational disruptions and ensured continuity.

Throughout the integration process, ASNSKY’s team collaborated closely with Doğan Trend’s IT department, addressing the specific requirements of different units and providing training for effective system use.

The results

Implementing the new monitoring system rapidly delivered the following results:

  • Enhanced visibility: Real-time monitoring of all IT locations and components made potential issues easy to spot.
  • Proactive issue management: Early detection of critical issues reduced operational downtime.
  • Increased efficiency: The centralized monitoring system drastically improved the responsiveness and effectiveness of Doğan Trend’s IT team.

“This project with the ASNSKY team made our IT infrastructure more transparent and manageable. With Zabbix’s flexible and effective monitoring capabilities, we gained active control over our critical operations. We thank the ASNSKY team for this successful collaboration.” – Burak Altunalan, IT System Management Specialist at Doğan Trend Automotive

In conclusion

Doğan Trend plans to further take advantage of Zabbix’s flexibility to strengthen their resilience and operational efficiency. Their association with ASNSKY marks a significant step toward achieving these objectives.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for retail customers in every sector, get in touch with us. 

About ASNSKY

ASNSKY enhances its customers’ competitiveness by integrating the power of enterprise-grade open-source-solutions in security and infrastructure with a professional service approach and high quality standards.

Backed by deep industry expertise and a team of seasoned professionals, ASNSKY stands as a trusted partner in your digital transformation journey.

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Zabbix and a Federal Government Agency

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-and-a-federal-government-agency/30708/

Our Premium Partners at the ATS Group work with a large federal government agency in the United States. They primarily provide storage and compute-as-a-service for the agency, which relies on them to stay up and running at all times.

The challenge

The agency’s primary goal was to simplify their capacity and performance monitoring without extra costs. They had very strict regulatory and SLO oversight requirements that had to be met, especially when it came to capacity and performance.

There was no commercially available software that could accomplish everything they needed directly out of the box, but they still required a solution that was powerful and flexible enough to monitor almost anything.

The solution

Because the agency has several different data centers of different sizes, they use a distributed proxy set up, intense SLA reporting, a ServiceNow integration, a variety of internal integrations, and a monitoring solution provided by Zabbix that includes a predictive alerting setup.

The agency has plenty of software in the mix, but it primarily relies on storage, VMWare, and Kubernetes. They also have multiple satellite offices and data centers, so that in the event of a data center failure, another can come online with minimal downtime in between.

On top of that, they have over 30 metrics and more than a trillion data points across 10 major technologies that they need to measure, primarily from a regulatory perspective. Thousands of granular metrics needed to have solutions and reporting designed for them in Zabbix, including (for example) CPU cores and frequency, processor-to-core usage metrics, and virtualization ratios from hosts to virtual machines.

Their Kubernetes-based Openshift environment also needs to be monitored to exact specifications. Deployment took place via Helm Chart, with Zabbix components being installed as Kubernetes resources, node-level resources, and applications being monitored, while data was aggregated and sent to the Zabbix server.

Metrics are collected via the Kubernetes API and kube-state metrics, and the solution uses Prometheus-exported metrics or direct HTTP endpoint calls. When it comes to configuration, proxies and hosts are created in Zabbix to represent Kubernetes nodes and clusters, while templates and macros are configured to point to the Kubernetes API and kube-state-metrics endpoints.

The results

Thanks to Zabbix, the federal government agency in question has a solution that provides centralized monitoring of Kubernetes alongside other IT resources, supports application-specific metrics without requiring Prometheus endpoints, and offers plenty of flexibility to customize and scale.

In addition, Zabbix’s predictive alerting capabilities identify abnormalities in operational data and predictively alert the agency about anything that could potentially impact an application or service, which lets them meet SLAs, optimize user experience, and increase productivity.

In conclusion

Zabbix’s flexibility and ease of customization make it ideal for customers who need a single source of truth that can be relied on in even the most stringent regulatory environments.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in the public sector, visit us here.

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Zabbix at the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-at-the-netherlands-ministry-of-infrastructure-and-water-management/30681/

The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is the Dutch ministry responsible for transport, aviation, housing policy, public works, spatial planning, land management, and water resource management. Created in 2010 following the merger of the Ministry of Transport and Water Management and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and Environment, the ministry works to create an efficient network of roads, railways, waterways, and airways, effective water management to protect against flooding, and improved air and water quality.

The challenge:

The ministry needed a monitoring solution that could handle not only infrastructure monitoring, but also IoT devices responsible for monitoring water levels, water quality, temperature, and other data. The infrastructure components that needed to be monitored included Red Hat Satellite and Capsule servers, Red Hat Virtual Data Centers, Red Hat Identity management, Ansible automation platforms, and a wide range of custom IoT devices.

The solution:

The Red Hat Satellite and Capsule monitoring consists of one satellite, 6 server, and 15 satellite capsules for different environments, with approximately 2000 Linux machines connected to the satellite capsules. The machines retrieve their packages from the capsules and the capsules act as proxies that fetch data from the satellite servers. The capsules also manage the content packages and subscriptions for the machines.

For Red Hat satellite and Capsule monitoring, Zabbix performs capsule discovery via Low Level Discovery, which uses Http requests, which in turn collect data via the REST API. Each capsule’s content sync status is monitored and if the content sync fails, new packages are not installed. Connectivity between capsules and the satellite is also monitored by performing port checks, because capsules need to be able to connect to the satellite in order for the content to be synced.

Zabbix also discovers and monitors satellite repositories, checking both when the last sync was performed and the current sync status. Software subscriptions are also discovered and monitored and alerts are sent, with the severity of the alerts raised at the point when a subscription has only 30 days remaining.

Red Hat Virtual Data Center licences and identity management also benefit from the added flexibility that Zabbix brings to the table. Virtual DC licences must be present on ESX hosts, so situations where an ESX host with an active license has no VMS on it (or has VMS migrated to it) must be avoided, because that would mean that a license is being essentially wasted. Whenever a Zabbix trigger detects a problem, Ansible automatically attaches or detaches a licence to or from the ESX host, depending on the type of problem detected.

When it comes to Red Hat identity management, Zabbix discovers and monitors processes on the identity management platform (including identity management service status) thanks to the ability to extend Zabbix agent with user parameters.

Meanwhile, Ansible Automation Platform monitoring consists of monitoring for controllers. The Ansible Automation Platform API is used to discover the controllers, and each controller is checked to see if any jobs are running, their last seen time, their capacity, and their status. Sometimes controllers are disabled for maintenance and then re-enabled, so alerts are sent out for controllers that have been disabled for a longer time.

Ansible Automation Platform monitoring also includes monitoring decommission machines, which are assigned to a group instead of being immediately deleted. Zabbix monitors the grace period for the decommission machines and alerts users if the grace period is over, generating a warning if an Ansible host is disabled for seven days and then escalating it if the machine has been disabled for more than 14 days.

Zabbix also discovers and monitors configuration management jobs, and if a job fails it will attempt to restart it. If the issue is still not resolved, it gets escalated to the appropriate individual. These Ansible checks are primarily done via Http agents, from Zabbix servers or proxies.

Finally, in addition to infrastructure monitoring, Zabbix also monitors the health of IoT devices responsible for water levels, water quality, temperature, and other data. These devices are running Raspberry Pi modules and Zabbix Agent 2 is used to monitor the device status. Zabbix Agent 2 with a local agent database is used in cases where the agent is unable to send the metrics on these devices. Should a network outage happen, Zabbix stores the backlog data in the local agent database.

The results:

Trusting their monitoring to Zabbix has greatly improved processes at the ministry, saving time and money by making it easy to notice and fix issues before affected departments themselves were aware of them. In addition, having the latest historical data at their fingertips has been invaluable to the ministry’s technical teams during troubleshooting or when dealing with performance issues, saving everyone involved a great deal of time.

In conclusion

Zabbix’s flexible nature and its ability to integrate with popular platforms as well as custom devices made it the perfect “one-stop shop” for the ministry’s needs, consolidating all of their monitoring in a single pane of glass and giving them complete visibility into every layer of their infrastructure – while also integrating smoothly with their existing systems.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in the public sector, contact us.

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Build a Culture of Monitoring and Get Buy-In with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/build-a-culture-of-monitoring-and-get-buy-in-with-zabbix/30085/

In today’s fast-paced, interconnected IT world, simply waiting for something to fail before fixing it isn’t good enough. A proactive approach to monitoring, which aims to identify and address potential issues before they escalate into major disruptions, is a necessity rather than a luxury.

Here at Zabbix, we’ve got plenty of reason to believe that we offer the most flexible monitoring solution available on the market today. However, choosing the best monitoring tool for your organization’s needs is only half the battle – you also need to get buy-in from team members who may not understand the need for monitoring, may be fearful of and resistant to change, and may not be familiar with the technologies behind monitoring.

In this post, we’ll take a look at a few strategies you can use to help win over lukewarm or hesitant colleagues and build a culture of monitoring. We’ll also explore how choosing Zabbix for your monitoring needs can make each strategy a bit easier to implement.

Strategy 1: Explain the “why”

One of the first questions that you can anticipate during any change initiative is simply, “what for?” The ethos of “don’t fix what isn’t broken” runs strong in the tech community, and unless you go above and beyond to explain why monitoring matters, your team will remain skeptical.

Zabbix can help you make your case by providing you with the evidence you need to bolster your case. We’ve got plenty of testimonials available from tech communities worldwide (including PeerSpot, Gartner, and Capterra), and no matter what field you’re in or how big your team is, we’ve most likely got a case study or two available that shows how monitoring with Zabbix was a game changer for a company like yours.

All of this should help you explain the rationale for the change in an open and transparent way. When it comes to monitoring, sharing details on costs, expected benefits, and what will happen if no change is made will build understanding around why monitoring is necessary and why monitoring with Zabbix is the right answer for your team’s needs.

Strategy 2: Show your team what’s in it for them

One of the most effective ways to get employee buy-in for monitoring is by highlighting the benefits it will bring to individual employees. Show how monitoring can simplify their tasks, improve efficiency, and enhance their work experience, and give them concrete examples of how the technology can make their jobs easier or help them to deliver better results.

We recently had a large managed services provider (MSP) use our monitoring solution as a true “force multiplier”, allowing them to monitor their systems, automate tasks based on real-time events, and provide immediate responses to issues without manual intervention. Thanks to Zabbix, their engineers report higher job satisfaction thanks to no longer having to be “on call” at all hours to solve simple issues, while management has seen productivity skyrocket thanks to their team’s newfound ability to find potential issues before they become real problems.

Strategy 3: Turn important stakeholders into monitoring champions

Determine who monitoring will impact and who needs to be kept informed. This might be team leaders, IT staff, end users, and/or an executive sponsor. Getting input from these groups early on will help you anticipate needs and concerns, and you’ll also want to identify influential employees who are enthusiastic about monitoring and get them to help you promote it.

A great way to help them do so is by encouraging them to attend one (or more) Zabbix events – we’ve got free meetings, online meetups, regional conferences, or even our yearly Summit in Latvia. No matter where you happen to be located, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll soon be bringing your key people a chance to network with like-minded professionals from multiple industries, expand their knowledge, get answers to their questions, and explore how Zabbix can work for them.

Strategy 4: Provide adequate training

Equipping employees with the skills and knowledge they need to get the most out of a monitoring system means gaining a solid understanding of their current capabilities and then finding out which gaps you most urgently need to fill. Chances are, you’ll need to provide guidance, documentation, hands-on demonstrations, and access to experts – and this is another area where Zabbix has you covered.

Zabbix Certified trainings are designed to help your people learn Zabbix inside and out, giving them the practical knowledge they’ll need to increase their productivity and performance. When you explore our training options, you’ll find a wide variety of courses, everything from one-day sessions that cover the basics to week-long sessions that guarantee users the ability to tackle any Zabbix challenge on their own.

In addition, we’ve got plenty of other free resources available to teams and individuals looking to upskill, including our famously active forum, blog, webinars, and newsletter.

Conclusion

Building a culture of monitoring requires commitment from every level of an organization. By choosing Zabbix as the guide to your monitoring journey and following the strategies outlined in this article, you and your team can successfully implement and maintain a robust monitoring strategy that will help you achieve your organization’s IT goals.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for you, visit our website.

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The ATS Group and a Large MSP

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/the-ats-group-and-a-large-msp/29857/

One of the most critical clients of our Premium Partners at the ATS Group is a large MSP that acts as a service and administration platform for their own clients, providing them with hardware, software, engineers, support staff, metrics, and reporting.

The challenge

The MSP needed a stable, high-performance platform monitoring solution that would cover all the services they provided. They didn’t have the capabilities or budget to run multiple monitoring solutions – a single, flexible solution that could track every service was paramount, as was the ability to react to anomalies before they became serious problems.

After an initial trial with a different monitoring solution that was notable for poor service, a lack of integrations, no community, and almost no documentation, they took a closer look at Zabbix, thanks in large part to our focus on preventative action and automation.

The solution

Because of their focus on performance-based monitoring, the client went with a “hot-cold” architecture and an integration with Ansible EDA, which stands for Event-Driven Ansible. It turned out to be a true “force multiplier”, as using Zabbix, Ansible, and EDA together allowed the MSP to monitor their systems, automate tasks based on real-time events, and provide immediate responses to issues without manual intervention.

The integration was designed to sort issues by whether or not they were able to be automated. If an issue arose that required human intervention, alerts could be sent to ServiceNow via multiple channels. If human intervention was unnecessary, the issue was rerouted to Event-Driven Ansible, which runs automation on all monitored hosts.

For example, with the joint Zabbix/Ansible solution, a slash admin backstage management system filling up at 2AM because of an overflowing log file for some script is no longer an urgent issue. If there are multiple gigabytes of room in the volume group, Zabbix can tell Ansible it’s a problem. Ansible can then increase the file system by 25% and send a message letting the engineers know in the morning that they took action on their behalf.

The results

With essentially no software costs and an automation integration that can find issues and fix them independently, the MSP was able to rapidly achieve a much higher service-to-spend ratio than they’d ever imagined possible.

There has been a noted increase in employee satisfaction as well – thanks to automation, engineers no longer have to be “on call” at all hours to solve simple issues, while C-level executives have seen productivity skyrocket thanks to the joint solution’s ability to find potential issues before they become real problems.

In conclusion

At Zabbix, we work hard to stay on the forefront of automation. That means constantly improving our own product while also staying on top of new technologies like Event-Driven Ansible in order to better integrate with them. To learn more about what Zabbix can do for MSPs, visit us here.

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Building a Monitoring Dashboard: Which Metrics to Track?

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/building-a-monitoring-dashboard-which-metrics-to-track/29777/

A well-designed monitoring dashboard is the key to helping users process, interact with, and analyze data. Done right, it allows key decision-makers to track metrics and gain insights in an organized, easy-to-read format, while giving technical teams complete visibility into IT performance at a single glance. Done wrong, it creates information overload, with too much of everything – too many graphs, colors, widgets, and other sources of information, making it at best deceptive and at worst completely useless.

Obviously, there’s no dashboard big enough to display every possible metric for every possible stakeholder, which is why the key to making a well-organized, informative dashboard that doesn’t confuse the viewer is knowing which metrics to track. By sticking to the absolute “must haves,” you’ll make sure that users can find mission-critical information first. But how should you choose which metrics to track? We’ve put our hard-won dashboard expertise to work and identified four key metric groups that no dashboard should be considered complete without.

Global metrics

System uptime and availability. Availability is one of the most important metrics you can use to determine your network’s performance, because it’s a metric that everyone can see the effects of immediately. For a business, it’s critical when it comes to making sure that the services provided to users are consistently available.

Overall resource utilization (CPU, memory, disk storage, etc.). Think of tracking resource utilization like keeping tabs on your phone’s battery life. You need to track CPU, memory, disk storage, and network usage to keep everything running smoothly. Keeping an eye on those metrics will help you fix small issues before they turn into gigantic problems.

Top critical issues or alerts. Speaking of problems, they can and will happen – and when they do, you’ll naturally want to know about them as soon as possible. An alert can be as simple as a notification of a system update, or it can draw attention to an unusual spike in errors. It could also call attention to a major emergency that demands immediate attention. Either way, no effective dashboard is complete without them.

SLA compliance status. If you’re running a business, monitoring SLA compliance status lets you see service availability and performance, which in turn guarantee customer satisfaction. It allows for quick detection of issues, making proactive management and resolution possible before customers feel any impact.

Infrastructure metrics

Server performance (CPU, RAM, disk I/O). Tracking the response time, central processing unit (CPU) utilization, memory consumption, and network bandwidth of a server helps guarantee a functional user experience. It involves keeping an eye on CPU and RAM utilization, disk I/O (input and output operations involving a physical disk), plus a variety of other sub-metrics.

Application health. Monitoring application health involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about an application’s performance, availability, and behavior. It’s mission-critical because it can help you detect and troubleshoot problems, optimize resource utilization, and provide the application’s users with the quality experience they expect.

Storage usage and trends. Keeping track of storage usage on your dashboard gives you a real-time view of storage metrics as well as predictive analytics (useful for capacity planning) and proactive issue detection, across on-premise and cloud storage environments. Like so many other monitored metrics, its purpose is to maintain optimal storage performance while preventing potential issues before they impact any business operations.

Database performance metrics. Basically, database monitoring is how you measure what you want to improve. It’s what you do before you start performance tuning. Keeping track of your database on your dashboard makes this possible by collecting performance metrics, so that you’re always aware of whether your database can fully support your applications and respond quickly to queries.

Network metrics

Bandwidth utilization and traffic patterns. Bandwidth refers to the maximum data transmission rate on a network at a particular time. Having this metric on your dashboard will let you easily track the amount of bandwidth your network is using and make you immediately aware if you run over the bandwidth threshold.

Latency and packet loss. Latency, or network delay, is a network performance metric that measures the amount of time it takes to transfer data from one destination to another. Consistent delays or unusual spikes in delay time usually mean that you have a major network performance issue. Tracking latency and packet loss on your dashboard will let you know if data transfers are taking too long, while also helping you make sure that any lost data packets get to their destinations.

Interface status and error rates. A network interface can be either networking hardware or a software interface. Monitoring them on your dashboard lets you see each and every network device, and tracking their performance is important when it comes time to identify the root causes of poor performance and network bottlenecks.

Firewall and VPN tunnel status. Monitoring the status of Firewalls and VPN tunnels is important because (among other things) it keeps you aware of whether your VPN tunnel interface is up and available for passing traffic, and whether the destination IP address being monitored is reachable. At the same time, you’ll also have access to real-time information about how your firewall is working, which will keep you aware of any security holes or incorrect settings before they become major problems.

Security metrics

Unauthorized access attempts. Unauthorized access is a big risk to businesses, jeopardizing sensitive data and disrupting operations. You can track attempts by unauthorized users to gain access to any website, server, device, or app by monitoring user activity on your dashboard. This data can also be labeled and sorted so that you can easily interpret it at a glance.

Endpoint security status (AV, patching). Endpoints are basically any devices that connect to networks, including laptops, mobile phones, and IoT devices. The more of them you have, the greater your chances of data loss and cyber threat entry. Monitoring the critical junctures of endpoints on your dashboard will help you identify and prevent threats while making sure that you have quick response measures in place to protect your data and systems.

Compliance and audit logs. Compliance and audit logs are there to make sure errors are noticed and fixed, keep you compliant with regulatory requirements, improve business security, and detect fraud. Monitor them on your dashboard, and you’ll have real-time visibility into your compliance posture as well as immediate alerts when a potential violation is detected.

Active security alerts or anomalies. Continuously keeping an eye on your systems and network lets you detect threats (anything from malware to abnormal activities and unauthorized access) before they escalate and cause real damage. In turn, this helps you maintain user trust, avoid downtime, and comply with data security regulations.

These metrics should give any dashboard a solid foundation that can be easily customized to meet specific business or operational goals.

The Zabbix Advantage

One of Zabbix’s most important features has always been our easily customizable dashboards, which allow users to see and analyze even the most complex monitoring data at a single glance. When it’s time to keep tabs on the essential metrics we identified above, Zabbix dashboards allow anyone (or any infrastructure team) to efficiently monitor network performance, manage resource usage, and guarantee device/application availability.

Zabbix’s graphing and visualization features make it easy to see historical trends and make comparisons. You can choose whatever visualization format is best for a particular set of data, including line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, gauges, and more. Not only that, Zabbix dashboard widgets can communicate with each other, serve as data sources for other widgets, and dynamically update the information they display based on the data source.

To learn more about the flexibility of Zabbix dashboards and see how they can help you track just about any metric imaginable, contact us.

The post Building a Monitoring Dashboard: Which Metrics to Track? appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

NIS2 Requirement Support: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/nis2-requirement-support-the-zabbix-advantage/29743/

In order to stay on top of a constantly-evolving cybersecurity landscape, the European Union has made the Network and Information Security (NIS2) Directive the cornerstone of their efforts to guarantee a uniform level of cybersecurity across all member states.

Introduced in 2020 and coming into effect on January 16, 2023, the NIS2 Directive is a continuation and expansion of NIS, the previous EU cybersecurity directive. NIS2 strengthens NIS, expands its scope, and introduces new requirements to help protect vital infrastructure, critical services, and key sectors from cyber threats.

In this post, we’ll go into detail about 8 key NIS2 requirements and see how Zabbix can help organizations meet each one.

NIS2 Requirement 1: Analyze risks and provide information system security.

Zabbix is set up to detect anomalies, suspicious activities, resource overload, downtime, and many other “red flags.” It can also monitor bandwidth usage and network interface metrics, and track the integrity of important files, including password and configuration files.

Monitoring critical services that prevent potential attacks (such as firewalls) is simple and intuitive, as is checking for open ports and insecure webpages. Not only that, Zabbix can track sensors in data centers to detect any physical security breaches and set up a customized alerting workflow for specific events.

NIS2 Requirement 2: Have procedures in place to handle security incidents as they arise.

Zabbix can provide real-time monitoring and alert users to potential incidents, keep a comprehensive log history for root cause analysis, and support multiple notification channels and scenarios for incident reporting. It can also share real-time incident data with external systems (via integrations or APIs) and display custom dashboards and reports about ongoing incidents.

NIS2 Requirement 3: Have backup management, disaster recovery, and crisis management plans in place to provide business continuity.

Zabbix supports Veeam (OOB) and Bacula data platforms, as well as many others. It can also monitor the backup execution process while tracking the storage and usage of backup servers.

NIS2 Requirement 4: Maintain supply chain security, including security-related aspects concerning the relationships between each entity and its direct suppliers or service providers.

Zabbix users can easily monitor third-party services and dependencies (such as APIs or libraries) for availability and performance, while being alerted to any potential vulnerabilities or disruptions in supply chain services. What’s more, Zabbix can also handle service monitoring and SLA reporting, keeping users updated around the clock on progress against predefined SLAs.

NIS2 Requirement 5: Provide security in network and information systems acquisition, development, and maintenance – including vulnerability handling and disclosure.

With Zabbix, a user can easily track software versions and check for outdated components, thanks to Zabbix’s ability to integrate with external tools for checking vulnerabilities.

NIS2 Requirement 6: Have policies and procedures in place regarding the use of cryptography and encryption.

Zabbix makes it simple for organizations of any size to comprehensively monitor encryption certificates for expiration.

NIS2 Requirement 7: Maintain HR security by providing accessible control and asset management policies.

Zabbix allows organizations to quickly and easily monitor user actions via log files.

NIS2 Requirement 8: Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) or continuous authentication solutions, secured voice, video and text communications, and secured emergency communication systems.

Zabbix is set up to monitor the performance and uptime of any identity provider (IdP), using APIs provided by the IdPs themselves to query MFA policies and user login events. Zabbix can also monitor logs for MFA-related events while providing custom dashboards and reports on MFA usage.

In conclusion:

NIS2 is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, and Zabbix has what it takes to equip organizations with the knowledge they need to thrive in this new regulatory environment. Trusting your monitoring to Zabbix can enhance your overall cybersecurity posture and supporting a comprehensive NIS2 implementation strategy.

To learn more, visit our website.

The post NIS2 Requirement Support: The Zabbix Advantage appeared first on Zabbix Blog.