Zabbix

Stands for: Alexei Vladishev's open source monitoring platform, 1.0 in 2004, Riga

An open source monitoring platform created by Alexei Vladishev in 2001, released as 1.0 in 2004 and backed since 2005 by a company in Riga; it collects over SNMP, IPMI, JMX and its own agents into a relational database and has been under the AGPLv3 since 7.0.

Zabbix monitors networks, servers, virtual machines and cloud services: it collects metrics via SNMP, IPMI, JMX and custom agents, stores them in a relational database, PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB, Oracle or TimescaleDB, and provides alerting, visualisation and reporting through a web front end. Alexei Vladishev started it in 2001 as an internal monitoring tool and released the first stable version, 1.0, in 2004; the company's own history begins in 2005 with a small group of passionate individuals led by Vladishev, who is still chief executive and founder, headquartered in Latvia with offices in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Japan and France. The server and the original agent are written in C, the newer agent2 in Go, the web front end in PHP, and a Java gateway handles JMX; proxies collect at remote sites and forward to the server. Version 3.0 in February 2016 was the first long-term support release; 7.0 LTS in June 2024 changed the licence from GPLv2 to AGPLv3 and added browser-based synthetic monitoring. The company's one-line description of its model: free and open source software backed by a mature, reliable vendor.

Architecture. The Zabbix server collects data from agents and other sources, evaluates trigger conditions, sends alerts and stores data in a relational database; supported databases include PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, Oracle and TimescaleDB as a PostgreSQL extension for time series. For distributed monitoring, Zabbix proxies collect data at remote sites and forward it to the central server, reducing bandwidth and buffering locally if the connection drops, which is how a Brazilian branch network reports to a head office through thin links. The original agent, in C, runs on Linux and Unix systems; agent2, written in Go from version 4.0, executes checks concurrently and takes plugins; a Java gateway handles JMX; and agentless collection over SNMP and IPMI covers the devices that cannot run anything.

Versions as a map of the trade. 1.0 appeared in 2004 and 1.1 later that year, after which development branches took odd numbers and stable releases even ones. 1.8 in December 2009 added auto-discovery and auto-registration of hosts; 2.0 in May 2012 the screen-based dashboards and template inheritance; 3.0 in February 2016, the first long-term support release, encryption between agent and server and predictive trigger functions; 4.0 in October 2018 the Go agent with a plugin architecture; 5.0 LTS in May 2020 a monitoring proxy for distributed environments and SAML authentication; 6.0 LTS in February 2022 high-availability clustering for the server, Kubernetes monitoring and machine-learning anomaly detection; 7.0 LTS in June 2024 browser-based synthetic monitoring, an improved API, proxy load balancing and the licence change from GPLv2 to AGPLv3.

The company. Zabbix SIA, also written Zabbix LLC, is based in Riga, Latvia; its about page says it began in 2005 with a small group of passionate individuals led by Alexei Vladishev, names him chief executive and founder, and lists offices in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Japan and France with headquarters in Latvia. The model is stated in one sentence, free and open source software backed by a mature reliable vendor, and it has not changed in twenty years: the software costs nothing, the company sells support, training, certification and consulting.

Where it sits. Beside Nagios, which spread through plugins and forks, and OpenNMS, which nearly died twice before its company existed, Zabbix is the monitoring project that kept one founder, one company and one code base from the start, and its Brazilian office is why the name is as familiar in São Paulo as in Riga. The Zabbix record on the industry timeline carries the dates; the Grafana entry describes the dashboard many Zabbix installations now wear.

Also known as: zabbix server, zabbix agent, zabbix proxy, zabbix 7.0

Sources

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