Zabbix - Alexei Vladishev's internal tool of 2001 became a Riga company in 2005 and a monitoring platform with offices on four continents, free and open source throughout.

Zabbix is an open source monitoring platform for networks, servers, virtual machines and cloud services: it collects metrics over SNMP, IPMI, JMX and its own agents, stores them in a relational database 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 says it began in 2005 with a small group of passionate individuals led by Vladishev, who remains chief executive and founder.

The company, Zabbix SIA, is headquartered in Latvia and has offices in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Japan and France. Its own description of the model is one sentence: free and open source software backed by a mature, reliable vendor. The server and the original agent are written in C, a newer agent2 in Go, the web front end in PHP and a Java gateway handles JMX.

The version history is a map of what monitoring came to mean. 1.8 in December 2009 added auto-discovery and auto-registration of hosts; 2.0 in May 2012 the dashboard system and template inheritance; 3.0 in February 2016, the first long-term support release, encryption between agent and server and predictive triggers; 4.0 in October 2018 the Go agent with a plugin architecture; 5.0 LTS in May 2020 the monitoring proxy for distributed sites and SAML; 6.0 LTS in February 2022 high-availability clustering, Kubernetes monitoring and anomaly detection; 7.0 LTS in June 2024 browser-based synthetic monitoring and proxy load balancing, and a licence change from GPLv2 to AGPLv3.

Beside Nagios and OpenNMS on this record, Zabbix is the one that kept a single company and a single codebase from the start, and the one with an office in Brazil.

Zabbix - About ↗

From the company

Sources