Zabbix

Zabbix
Developer(s) Zabbix SIA
Stable release 2.4.5 / April 21, 2015
Preview release 2.4.5rc1 / April 10, 2015
Development status active
Written in C (server, proxy, agent), PHP (frontend), Java (Java gateway)
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Network management system
License GNU General Public License version 2
Website www.zabbix.com

Zabbix is an enterprise open source monitoring solution for networks and applications, created by Alexei Vladishev. It is designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware.

Zabbix uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data.[1] Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. Zabbix offers several monitoring options:

On the downside, it is widely known to have too many bugs and the community developed templates and scripts are rather limited in comparison to the alternatives, such as Nagios.

Released under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2, Zabbix is free software.

History

Zabbix started as an internal software project in 1998. After 3 years, in 2001, it was released to the public under GPL.[2] It took three more years until the first stable version, 1.0, was released in 2004.

Zabbix 1.1 alpha6
Timeline of releases
Date Release
Zabbix 1.0
1998 Zabbix started as an internal project in a bank by Alexei Vladishev[2]
7 April 2001 Zabbix 1.0alpha1 is released as GPL[3]
23 March 2004 Zabbix 1.0 released[4]
Zabbix 1.x
6 February 2006 Zabbix 1.1 released[4]
29 May 2007 Zabbix 1.4 released[4]
11 September 2008 Zabbix 1.6 released[4]
7 December 2009 Zabbix 1.8 released[4]
Zabbix 2.x
21 May 2012 Zabbix 2.0 released[4]
12 Nov 2013 Zabbix 2.2 released[4]
11 Sep 2014 Zabbix 2.4 released[4]

Features

Development

Today, Zabbix is primarily developed by a dedicated company, Zabbix SIA.

Source code

Zabbix consists of several separate modules:

While the server, proxy and agents are written in C, the frontend is implemented in PHP and Javascript.

Java gateway, available since Zabbix 2.0, is written in Java.

Releases

Since the first stable version was released as 1.0, Zabbix versioning has only increased minor version numbers. Each minor release actually implements many new features, while change level releases mostly introduce bugfixes.

Zabbix version numbering scheme has changed. While the first two stable branches were 1.0 and 1.1, after 1.1 it was decided to use odd numbers for development versions and even numbers for stable versions. As a result, 1.3 followed 1.1 as a development release to be released as 1.4.

Timeline

Note: this chart excludes release candidates in stable branches.

See also

References

  1. ↑ List of supported databases in the manual
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Presentation, containing early history
  3. ↑ Freshmeat announcement page
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Zabbix news list

External links

Support sites

Books

English
Japanese

Zabbix installations

Third-party libraries and tools

See the officially listed Zabbix 3rd Party Tools.

Community repositories

See the Zabbix community repos on Github. It links many Zabbix projects: templates, script, APIs, integrations, ...

Libraries

See the Zabbix community site for a list of libraries.

Data collection extensions

Mobile clients

Browser-based
Android
iPhone
Windows Phone