Getting started with Zabbix

My studies in this wonderful monitoring platform, Zabbix, began in 2005, with the first version of the software. Actually, my experience in monitoring systems dates back to 1994. Since then, I've encountered several tools, commercial and open source, for monitoring IT environments. I admit that open source tools have always been my favorite because of the flexibility that they offer and also because of the developers' ideology. These two points have always guided me in finding and using IT solutions.

When I came across Zabbix in 2005, the platform had not grown enough to be used in our production environments. It started growing from then on, and apparently had good potential. In 2007, with Zabbix version 1.4, we understood that the platform had evolved enough to meet our and our customers' environments. Then we encountered one of the scenarios mentioned in the previous section (using a tool with the concepts of another tool), and faced difficulties in this scenario. The fact is that Zabbix has a learning curve that is a bit steeper than other platforms, because Zabbix's size and the number of features that this platform provides are greater than those of any other technology. Now, challenges will arise because of the large number of features and possibilities with Zabbix, but it grants us fairly wide comprehensiveness in our IT environment. The use of all of these resources without proper planning and understanding of all of Zabbix's components can lead us to a common situation where the monitoring environment will collapse, thus making us abandon the platform.