Monitoring the community – two years later

Some might recall that back in 2011 we dug into old logfiles and produced a 5 year graph of Zabbix user count in the #zabbix IRC channel. At the same time, monitoring at a higher rate – hourly – was set up, and data collection started. Now that it’s been 2 years since that graph, let’s take a look at the new graph, how the user count has changed in two years and how Zabbix copes with a 7 year graph.

Looking at the graph for the whole period – as of the time of this writing, a bit more than 7 years – we can observe a nice and rapid growth – two years ago the maximum was 126 users or so, by now it has increased to 227.

The vertical marker has been added around the time of the previous article. It’s worth noting that a graph for this period was generated in one fifth of a second (take a look at the lower right corner of the graph). If you spotted that it’s really hard to tell where a year changes, make sure to vote on a feature request that asks to improve this.

If you also spotted the strange 6y 12m 2d graph title, that should be fixed by now 😉

To make it easier to visualise the user count growth, let’s look at a bar chart:

Same as two years ago, the Zabbix IRC channel has gathered advanced community members that discuss topics that are related to Zabbix, including problem solving, upcoming features and of course the Zabbix Conference 2013 🙂

What’s new? Well, as the user amount has increased, discussions have become more interesting, intense and advanced. There is now also a channel for German-speaking Zabbix users, #zabbix-de.

When looking at a graph for a couple of weeks, we can see that the same variation during working hours and weekends still exists, although it has slightly shifted to the right – probably as an indicator that we are receiving more visitors from the Americas:

The graph can be seen in a Zabbix demo installation, where you are able to choose any time period and see how the user count changed.

IRC is a great place to get and offer help. If you still haven’t joined us, do so now 🙂