2020 was not an easy year, but it challenged and taught us a lot. Let’s sum up the past year’s results together and make some plans for the next one.
Going online
Despite the worldwide lockdown and the entire team’s inability to work from the office, Zabbix continued to evolve and get better. The Zabbix 5.0 release was the first release to be done remotely – without the usual cake and “family” celebration on release day in our cozy office kitchen. Version 5.2 also followed remotely, with the already familiar online celebration in Zoom.
Unexpectedly we had to change the vector of planned activities. In January 2020, we expected to hold ten conferences in different countries of the world. But in reality, due to the pandemic and the restrictions it caused, we were only able to have a few: Zabbix Conference Benelux 2020, Zabbix Conference China 2020, and Zabbix Conference Japan 2020.
In 2020, we were going to have the biggest Zabbix Summit ever – the 10th-anniversary event. But plans changed, and instead, we held our first online Zabbix Summit. Given the unusual format of a traditional Zabbix Summit – it turned out very successful and proved the online version also could be sustainable. We are grateful to all the speakers and guests who supported us and joined the event.
We can say that 2020 was all about online events. We start a good tradition to hold Zabbix meetups online and received positive feedback from the community. Thanks to our partners’ support, online meetups have been held not only in English and Russian but also in Czech, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Polish. We will continue this tradition for sure, providing our users worldwide to learn Zabbix, share their experience, and meet co-thinkers. Remember that we always record the meetups for you to have access to presentations when it is required. Recordings are available on our website’s event section under each event.
Conquering the world
One of the most important events of 2020 for Zabbix was the opening of the office in Brazil. The software and professional services are now even more accessible to Latin American users thanks to language localization and the branch office’s closeness. We are happy to be part of one of Zabbix’s most active communities worldwide and being able to cooperate on a much greater level. We have expanded our Latin American branch with new Zabbix professionals, partners, and initiatives during last year.
We are also proud of making Zabbix more reachable for different language users – with our Latin American office, we opened Zabbix Spanish and Portuguese web page and thanks to our active partners – also German site. Now we are working on more languages to make our open source solution even more open.
As for the overall results, we can share with you some statistics
Our integration team has been very active over the past year and has released many useful templates. In total, their efforts resulted in 42 new templates and 20 new Webhook integrations.
Zabbix partnership network has also grown. Zabbix Partnership program creates a worldwide network of trustful and highly skilled companies ready to provide immediate technical assistance and become an accessible intermediary between you and the Zabbix team. This network has now grown by 40+ partners worldwide, resulting in around 200 partners for now.
In the past year, we rethought the professional training program and expanded it with extra training – one-day courses for in-depth study of one specific topic. These courses differ from the rest of the program by having no requirements. You can get extra knowledge about monitoring with Zabbix without Zabbix certification. Four additional training courses are available now, but we are working on the next topics to provide you.
Note that we have already published many training sessions for this year, so now is an excellent time to choose and book the courses and timing that suit you best. Don’t forget to use the filter – you can quickly sort courses by language, level, and location (online or on-site).
Speaking of statistics for last year, thanks to the Zabbix team and partners’ efforts, there were 203 training sessions in total. Altogether, 1,214 official Zabbix certificates were awarded to the training attendees who successfully mastered the material and passed the exam.
But education doesn’t end with training. Webinars are an excellent opportunity to learn different aspects of Zabbix for free. Note that we have also added the ability to watch recorded sessions at your convenience. And we also want to remind you not to forget to use the filter to navigate between sessions. We cover many topics in many different languages, and we want to make sure you don’t miss out on learning the material. Last year we hosted 245 webinar sessions (including 55 sessions held by Zabbix partners worldwide), and we hope it was beneficial for our community.
A sneak peek to 2021
So what can we expect from Zabbix in the new year of 2021? Lots of things! We are not going to stop and continue to work hard. The Zabbix software development roadmap is available on our website. Feel free to explore the features we are working on right now! We will continue to hold meetups, covering complex technical issues. As for the Zabbix Summit 2021, we are also planning to have it online in October 2021. The first experience was a success, so why not strengthen the achieved result. And as for other news, keep an eye on our updates here on the blog, social media, and newsletter. We have an exciting year ahead of us, so let’s make the most of it!
