For our March “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected ZABBIX, an enterprise-class, distributed monitoring solution for networks & apps. Recently we caught up with founder and CEO Alexei Vladishev, who shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the ZABBIX project please.
Alexei Vladishev (AV): Zabbix is a universal free monitoring platform aimed at real-time monitoring and sophisticated problem detection. Zabbix monitors servers, services, network devices, applications, cloud resources and databases. It’s a highly scalable enterprise-class solution, yet it’s convenient for individual users due to an extensive documentation and open code to customize Zabbix the way you want.
SF: What made you start this?
AV: It started about 20 years ago. Having been working as a system administrator of various Unix systems and database engines, I realized that there was a lack of solutions capable of monitoring what I had and being cost-effective at the same time. One day the idea just flashed in my mind: I had to make the tool I was looking for by myself, so I started working on “Zabbix”.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
AV: It exceeded my expectations! Of course there is always room for improvement, and we try to improve and extend Zabbix every day. But I am proud of what Zabbix has become, being highly competitive and sought-after in the market.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
AV: Practically anyone having IT infrastructure of any size. This includes devops, admins, network operations and managers interested in business metrics: availability of services, KPI and SLA. Our audience is much diversified, as Zabbix is suitable for everyone ranging from single users to global enterprises with highly distributed environment in different parts of the world. Zabbix is universal.
SF: What core need does ZABBIX fulfill?
AV: Zabbix provides its users a better sleep. Having the whole IT infrastructure under control, you don’t have to worry about it every single minute, as even if the problem is going to occur, you’ll be notified in advance or the problem will be fixed automatically thanks to a built-in ability to perform problem auto-remediation.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using ZABBIX ?
AV: It’s individual. Surely it takes some effort to explore and get used to Zabbix, but then you get the tremendous benefit of having a single pane of glass for all your IT environment and operations. Some may need just the things we provide out of the box; others may require additional integration and extension services. We provide all of this. There is free documentation and webinars, paid support and consultancy services as well as Zabbix Professional Training for those who strive to become a true Zabbix expert with certification to prove his/her knowledge and skills.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
AV: Community plays a huge role in the Zabbix life. We listen to the feature requests from our users. We organize Zabbix Meetups all around the globe, uniting our users in their regions with the help of our partners. We welcome our community to the Zabbix Conferences in Japan, China, Brazil and the main Zabbix event – Zabbix Summit in Riga.
SF: Have you found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
AV: I’d say it’s the quality not the frequency. Our users enjoy the improvements and innovations we provide and value the accessibility and scalability of the product. Nevertheless, frequent releases allow us to introduce more and more new things into Zabbix and deliver it faster to those who need it right now.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
AV: Well, I think that the first big thing is the decision to make it free and open source, i.e. available for everyone at no cost.
SF: What helped make that happen?
AV: I believe it was some sort of inner feeling that it was the right thing to do.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
AV: SourceForge is the second place for our users, right after our website, where they can safely download Zabbix. We are extremely thankful for your continuous support, you are doing a lot for open-source projects! You keep terabytes of Zabbix related files on your CDN servers and you do it for free, incredible!
SF: What is the next big thing for ZABBIX?
AV: Pretty soon the world will see the next LTS release of Zabbix – Zabbix 4.0, being a large step forward in managing everyday monitoring tasks within complex infrastructures. 4.0 will bring more power and accessibility for a user including much improved dashboards, visualisation and performance in general among other features and improvements.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
AV: We are talking about months, perhaps two or three. The work is already in full swing, we just need to test and finalize everything.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
AV: We enlarge our team steadily and we have a great team of experts working in different fields. Plus, the product is being tested not only by our test engineers, but also by our great community members, so we are more than ready for the big step.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for ZABBIX?
AV: It’s a good question, but I don’t know how to answer it. I guess I need more time to think about it.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
AV: Zabbix actively participates in various expos and conferences all over the world. So visit our website and check out where to chat with us face-to-face. And I’d also like to welcome everyone to our own event I’ve already mentioned – Zabbix Summit 2018, taking place on October 5-6 in Riga, Latvia. It’s a great place to meet the whole Zabbix Team, join workshops run by our experts, hear presentations on Zabbix implementation in different industries and meet our users and partners from more than 45 countries.
Zabbix homepage: https://www.zabbix.com
Events: https://www.zabbix.com/events
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