Enterprise-grade monitoring made easy

Zabbix is an extremely lightweight, easy-to-use and free monitoring tool that can scale from a small home lab to a huge multinational company. Zabbix can help monitor and highlight issues in the reader’s environment through a single application, making life easier. Even companies such as T-Mobile and Dell use it to manage parts of their estate.

Here we look at the functional pieces that make up the product and how to deploy it across your environment in a test scenario, whether that be a small home lab or a company. It can even monitor your cloud servers, should you want it to. It should be noted that this walkthrough does not address the security of the system – for example, encryption during data transmission or database security.

While it may not be obvious how a small home lab could benefit from such monitoring, try this real-life example: your internet goes offline… what time did it occur, how long did it last? What was the impact on other systems? If Zabbix was set to monitor uptime by pinging the device, this information would be recorded. That is but one trivial example. For smaller companies, a free but extremely capable monitoring system can make the difference between a well-managed IT environment and a disruption causing outage.

For the purpose of this guide it is assumed that the reader is able to set up basic servers and DNS. Although most of the site seems to prefer Cent OS, this demonstration is going to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Make sure to give the server