If you’ve been working with Zabbix (or are planning to), you’re in luck – we’ve recently launched Zabbix Academy, a new learning platform designed to empower IT professionals and monitoring enthusiasts with self-paced, expert-led training.
Zabbix Academy is the brainchild of Kristine Lamberte, Head of Training at Zabbix. Kristine was gracious enough to participate in a short interview where she shares the vision behind it, goes into detail about who it’s targeted at (spoiler alert – everyone!), and ruminates about the future of learning and development at Zabbix.
In the beginning: The vision behind Zabbix Academy
Was there anything in particular that inspired the creation of Zabbix Academy, and how does it fit into Zabbix’s long-term vision for community and professional development?
Zabbix itself is an extremely flexible tool, so we want to offer the same level of flexibility in our professional services. At that moment, we had enough variety in the training offer in terms of different courses for different experience levels, and we no doubt had (and still have) a great level of quality as well as theory and hands-on balance, so this was a natural next step in how we can offer even more for our users.
As for the long-term vision, Zabbix Academy supports the growth of the Zabbix ecosystem, it strengthens our training portfolio without replacing live courses, and it also demonstrates our ongoing investment in the community.
Do you see a primary audience for Zabbix Academy (beginners, professionals, enterprise clients, etc.) or is it meant to be universal?
We are ready to meet you at any stage of your Zabbix journey. The Academy has free quick-start guides in the form of free courses and webinars for those who are just starting, as well as a variety of courses on different levels – introduction, fundamental, intermediate, and advanced. And we will add new paid and free material on a regular basis for all levels.
The Zabbix Academy learning experience
How does Zabbix Academy go about keeping learning hands-on and practical for complicated monitoring scenarios?
All the people involved in the creation of training materials are Zabbix Certified Trainers and Zabbix Certified Experts with multiple years of experience. We have a deep understanding that no training material is complete without good-quality real-life use cases and practical tasks. So, it is natural that in Zabbix Academy, for all the paid courses, you will get not only high-quality theory, but also an option to do labs. Learners can experiment in a safe sandbox setting — so they’re not just reading about Zabbix, they’re actually using it.
Instructors and expertise
How do you ensure consistency and quality across so many different topics and courses?
Practice makes perfect, doesn’t it? It all comes down to the people who are behind the course creation. As I already mentioned, they are experienced Zabbix trainers and experts, but most importantly, they have hands-on experience with Zabbix.
But it is not only about our training content creators; we have close collaboration with other teams, for example, internally, support, developers, integrators, etc., and we also have extremely knowledgeable training partners who are very much involved in the review of new courses and suggestions for what’s coming.
Additionally, learner feedback plays a key role — we continuously refine and update materials based on real-world experience and community input.
Career impact
Can you give a hypothetical scenario of how Zabbix Academy could help an IT professional advance their career or an organization strengthen their monitoring practices?
Personally, I put more emphasis on what knowledge brings to the company. Knowing how to work smarter, more efficiently, use effective automations, troubleshoot faster, and come up with new ways of what and how to monitor is something that everyone should want for their business, and these things come with knowledge. What we offer is structured knowledge, packed and passed down to Zabbix users in the most effective way.
The future
What are your goals for the first year of Zabbix Academy, and how will you measure its success?
In the first year, it is crucial to continuously grow and shape Zabbix Academy. The measure of success? I mean, we created this platform for our users, so the measure of success is based on their satisfaction, engagement, and the impact this platform will have on their day-to-day tasks.
What future expansions or features can learners expect?
We aim to continuously expand the course catalogue, both free and paid content, and establish Zabbix Academy as a trusted source of knowledge for both new and existing users. In short, our goal is for Zabbix Academy to evolve into a dynamic, living resource that grows alongside Zabbix itself.
A final thought
From your perspective as Head of Training, what has been the most rewarding or challenging part of launching Zabbix Academy?
There were no challenges worth mentioning, but when it comes to the most rewarding thing, I can name a few.
First thing is that we established right from the beginning that Zabbix Academy will have all kinds of content, including free content. This once again supports our effort in strengthening our community.
Secondly, we did not compromise on the course quality; we took our classroom-quality courses and transformed them for the self-paced training.
But the most rewarding part has been seeing how excited our community is about Zabbix Academy. The feedback from early users and our partners has been overwhelmingly positive. That shows me that we are on the right track, and now we just need to keep on delivering things we are good at – great quality, hands-on content that allows Zabbix users to reach and exceed their monitoring goals.
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