Zabbix monitoring

What Zabbix is

Zabbix is an enterprise-class open-source monitoring platform that tracks the health, performance and availability of servers, network devices, cloud services and applications. It supports agent-based and agentless monitoring, SNMP, IPMI, JMX and custom checks, with a powerful alerting engine, dashboards, historical trend analysis and auto-discovery.

Screenshot evidence

Redacted Zabbix Global view monitoring dashboard — **Screenshot evidence.** A current Zabbix global view showing monitored availability, severity blocks and alert history. Hostnames and problem details have been redacted for privacy.

Zabbix is used in production by organisations of all sizes — from small labs to enterprises with tens of thousands of monitored hosts. It stores time-series data in a relational database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or TimescaleDB) and provides a web frontend for configuration and visualisation.

Why I run it

I use Zabbix as the primary availability and performance monitoring platform across my lab. Every host, container and network device reports into a central Zabbix server so I can see uptime, disk usage, CPU load, memory pressure and service states at a glance. When something goes wrong at 2am, I want to know before I notice — not after.

I also deployed Zabbix agents professionally during my time at ITHQ, connecting to client Zabbix servers and rolling out agents to client machines including the Hippodrome Casino infrastructure, so the technology is one I have used in both personal and commercial environments.

What I have done with it

Deployed Zabbix Server and agents across multiple Linux hosts
Configured SNMP monitoring for network switches
Built custom templates and triggers for service-specific alerting
Troubleshot MySQL character-set issues that caused dashboard display problems
Set up alert escalation and notification channels
Used Zabbix at ITHQ to monitor client infrastructure commercially

Implementation notes

Representative agent deployment

# Install Zabbix agent on a Debian/Ubuntu host
sudo apt install zabbix-agent2

# Point the agent at your Zabbix server
sudo sed -i 's/Server=127.0.0.1/Server=<ZABBIX_SERVER_IP>/' \
  /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agent2.conf

# Set the hostname to match the Zabbix frontend
sudo sed -i 's/Hostname=Zabbix server/Hostname=<THIS_HOST>/' \
  /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agent2.conf

sudo systemctl enable --now zabbix-agent2

What this gives you

Centralised, historical, alerting-capable visibility across the entire lab. When a disk fills, a service crashes or a host becomes unreachable, Zabbix tells me what happened and when — which is the difference between "it just stopped working" and "the /var partition hit 98% at 03:17 because log rotation failed."