A Clear View

Alerting

Alerting in Zabbix is equally flexible and as highly customizable as data acquisition and problem detection. Actions use conditions to select problem events on the basis of hostname and group, tags, or other criteria. They then complete operations for all events that belong to these problems.

Operations can break down problem notification into escalation levels. For example, the first notification could be emailed to the system administrator, and the second could be sent 10 minutes later as a short message to the on-call service. It is also easy to set up different temporally independent alerting paths for problems.

Zabbix refers to alerting paths as media types (Alerts | Media types ). Email is a typical media type, for example. To support this, Zabbix offers native integration for Microsoft Teams, Slack, Rocket.Chat, Jira, GitHub, Mattermost, Opsgenie, and many more. A total of 32 notification methods are available for selection; they only need to be adapted to the use case.

If the desired service for a notification is missing, it can be defined at any time with a script or a webhook with JavaScript-based business logic. Media type definitions can be exported and imported by the web interface like many other configuration objects in Zabbix. This facilitates exchange in the community, but also the ability to transfer configurations between individual Zabbix instances or between a development and production environment.

Conclusions

Zabbix leaves virtually nothing to be desired for system monitoring on a functional level and supports quick and uncomplicated implementation in a wide range of environments. The open source software is backed by a stable, commercially successful company that is constantly pushing forward with the development of the product in line with market requirements.

Admittedly, the learning curve with Zabbix is steep because the extensive configuration options and interrelationships of the individual components are not always apparent at first glance. Companies that want to get the most out of the solution and benefit from the experience of experts would do well to take advantage of the training, consulting, implementation, and support services offered by experienced, certified experts.