The natural growth

In most scenarios, natural growth will occur without control. I mean, people are not used to planning this growth. It is very important to keep it under control.

When some guys start their Zabbix deployment, they probably do not intend to cater to all company teams, areas, or businesses. They think about their needs and their team only. So, they don't think a lot about user rights, mainly because they are technicians and know mostly about hosts, items, triggers, maps, graphs, screens, and so on. What about users who are not technicians? Will they understand the Zabbix interface easily? Do you know that in Zabbix, we have a lot of paths that reach the same point?

The Zabbix interface isn't object-based, which means that users need a lot of clicks to reach (read or write) the information related to an object (hosts, items, graphs, triggers, events, and so on).

If you need to see the most recent data gathered from a specific item, you'll need to use the Monitoring menu, then use the Latest data menu, choose the group that the host belongs to, choose your host, and finally search for your item in the table.

If you need to see a specific custom graph, use the Graphs menu, which is under Monitoring. Choose the group that the hosts belong to, choose your host, and then search for your graph in a combobox.

If you need to know about an active trigger in your host, you'll need to use the Triggers menu, which is under Monitoring. Choose the group that your host belongs to and choose your host. Then, you can see the triggers from that specific host.

If you want to include a new item in an existing custom graph, you'll need to access the Hosts menu, which is under Configuration. Choose the group that the hosts belong to, search for your host, and click on the Graphs link. Then you can choose which graph you want to change.

There are a lot of clicks required to do simple things. Of course, the steps you just saw are something familiar for guys who have deployed Zabbix, but are this true for other teams too?

Maybe, you are thinking right now that it doesn't matter to those guys. But actually, it matters, and it's directly related to Zabbix's growth in your environment. Okay, I think the next two questions will be: are you sure it matters? And why?

Let's agree that the actual Zabbix interface isn't very user friendly for nontechnical guys. But according to the path of natural growth, you started gathering data from a lot of things that are not just IT related. Also, you can develop custom charts and any data from Zabbix via API functions. Now you'll have a lot of nontechnical guys trying to use Zabbix data. I'm sure that it will be necessary to create some maps and screens to help these users get the required information quickly and smoothly.

The following screenshots show how we can transform the viewing layer of Zabbix into something more attractive:

Tactical dashboard

Here is what a strategic dashboard may look like:

Strategic dashboard

The point here is whether your Zabbix deployment is prepared to cater to these types of requirements.