CIOs and CITOs know all too well that a smoothly functioning network is the backbone of any business. Your network has to guarantee reliability, performance, and security. An unreliable network, by contrast, means damaged productivity, negative customer perceptions, and haphazard security. The solution is network monitoring, and in this post we’ll explore the reasons why Zabbix is the ideal monitoring solution for any business.
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What is network monitoring?
Network monitoring is a critical IT process where all networking components (as well as key performance indicators like CPU utilization and network bandwidth) are constantly monitored to improve performance and eliminate bottlenecks. It provides real-time information that network administrators need to determine whether a network is running optimally.
Why Zabbix?
At Zabbix, we’re here to help you deliver for your customers, flawlessly and without interruptions. Our monitoring solution is 100% open source, available in over 20 languages, and able to collect an unlimited amount of data. Designed with enterprise requirements in mind, Zabbix provides a comprehensive, “single pane of glass” view of any size environment. Put simply, Zabbix allows you to monitor anything – from physical and virtual servers or containers to network infrastructure, applications, and cloud services.
What’s more, we offer a wide variety of additional professional services to go along with our solution, including:
- Multiple technical support subscriptions that are tailored to the needs of your business
- Certified training programs that are designed to help you master Zabbix under the guidance of top experts
- A wide range of professional services, including template building, upgrades, consulting, and more
Keep reading to find out more about the difference Zabbix can make for your business.
The Zabbix advantage
IT teams are under enormous pressure to have their networks functioning perfectly 100% of the time, and with good reason. It’s simply not possible to run a business with a malfunctioning network. Here are 5 key reasons why you need to make network monitoring a top priority, and why Zabbix is the right answer for all of them.
Reliability
A network monitoring solution’s main reason for being is to show whether a device is working or not. Taking a proactive approach to maintaining a healthy network will keep tech support requests and downtime to an absolute minimum. Zabbix makes it easy to do so by automatically detecting problem states in your metric flow. Not only that, but our automated predictive functions can also help you react proactively. They do this by forecasting a value for early alerting and predicting the time left until you reach a problem threshold. Automation then allows you to remove additional inefficiencies.
Visibility
Having complete visibility of all your hardware and software assets allows you to easily monitor the health of your network. Zabbix lets businesses access metrics, issues, reports, and maps with a single click, allowing you to:
- Analyze and correlate your metrics with easy-to-read graphs
- Track your monitoring targets on an interactive geo-map
- Display the statuses of your elements together with real-time data to get a detailed overview of your infrastructure on a Zabbix map
- Generate scheduled PDF reports from any Zabbix dashboard
- Extend the native Zabbix frontend functionality by developing your own frontend widgets and modules
Performance
By making it easy to monitor anything, Zabbix lets you know which parts of your network are being properly used, overused, or underused. This can help you uncover unnecessary costs that can be eliminated or identify a network component that needs upgrading.
Compliance
Today’s IT teams need to meet strict regulatory and protection standards in increasingly complex networks. Zabbix can spot changes in normal system behavior and unusual data flow. It can then either leverage multiple messaging channels to notify your team about anomalies or simply resolve any issues automatically.
Profitability
Zabbix has an extensive track record of making businesses more productive by saving network management time and lowering operating costs. Servers, for example, are machines that inevitably break down from time to time. Being able to quickly re-launch after a failure has occurred and minimizing the server downtime are vital. By making sure your team is aware of any and all current and impending issues, Zabbix can reduce downtime and increase the productivity and efficiency of your business.
Zabbix across industries
Whatever field you’re in, there’s no substitute for consistent, problem-free service when it comes to gaining the trust and loyalty of customers. Zabbix has an extensive track record of helping clients in multiple industries achieve their goals.
Zabbix for healthcare
A typical hospital relies on tens of thousands of connected devices. Manually checking each one for anomalies simply isn’t practical. Establishing a stable service level is a vital issue in most industries, but in healthcare it’s literally a matter of life and death. With Zabbix, hospital IT teams receive potentially life-saving alerts if anything is out of the ordinary.
What’s more, Zabbix can monitor progress toward expected outcomes, providing up-to-the-minute statistics on data errors or IT system failures. Issues, response times, and potential bottlenecks are displayed in easy-to-read graphs and charts. This allows hospital staff to follow up on the presence or absence of problems.
Zabbix for banking and finance
Financial institutions of all sizes rely on their networks to maintain connectivity and productivity. By processing millions of checks per minute and considering very complex dependencies between different elements of infrastructure, Zabbix allows banks to proactively detect and resolve network problems before they turn into major business disruptions.
Zabbix is also designed to seamlessly connect distributed architecture, including remote offices, branches, and even individual ATMs. Some of our financial industry clients previously used up to 20 different monitoring tools. Each alert sent hundreds of emails to different people, making it impossible to effectively monitor the environment. Naturally, they found Zabbix’s ability to monitor many thousands of devices and “single pane of glass” view to be a significant upgrade.
Zabbix for education
In an age of digital course materials and resources, schools and universities can’t operate without functioning IT infrastructures. Our clients in education typically have heterogeneous infrastructures with thousands of servers and clients. They also possess all kinds of connected devices, dozens of different operating systems, multiple locations, and hundreds of IT staff.
Zabbix has proven itself to be a simple, cost-effective method of monitoring geographically distributed campuses and educational sites. We’ve done this by:
- Providing early notification of possible viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other transmitters of system infection
- Monitoring IT systems for intellectual property (IP) protection purposes
- Saving human resources by reducing manual work
Zabbix for government
Network monitoring is critical for government agencies, as downtime can bring a halt to vital public services. Our public-sector clients range from city-wide public transportation companies all the way up to entire prefectures. They use Zabbix to monitor the availability of utilities, transport, lighting, and many other public services.
In the process, Zabbix increases the effectiveness of budget expenditures by providing precise and accountable data on how public resources are used. This makes it easier to justify further expenditures. In most business software, agents are required for each monitored host and costs increase in proportion to the number of monitored hosts. By contrast, Zabbix is open source and the software itself is free of charge, resulting in anticipated cost reductions of up to 25% in many cases.
Zabbix for retail
Retail environments increasingly depend on network-connected equipment, particularly when it comes to warehouse monitoring and tracking SKUs (stock keeping units). Zabbix delivers an all-in-one tool to monitor different applications, metrics, processes, and equipment while providing a complete picture about the availability and performance of all the components that make a retail business successful. This makes it possible for retailers to easily automate store openings and closings, monitor cash machines, and keep track of access system log entries.
Not only that, the quantity and quality of information that Zabbix collects makes it easy for retailers to conduct a more accurate analysis of what is happening (or what may happen) and take preventive measures. Our retail clients find that having this level of control over their resources and services increases the confidence of their teams as well as their customers.
Zabbix for telecom
Internet, telephony, and television verticals require availability and consistency. The key to success is providing your services 24/7/365.
Zabbix makes this possible by providing full visibility of all network and customer devices, allowing operators to know of any outage before customers do and take necessary actions. Some of our telecommunications clients are able to effortlessly monitor well over 100,000 devices with a single Zabbix server. This helps them improve the customer experience and driving growth in the process.
Zabbix for aerospace
In the aerospace industry, timely data delivery and issue notification are the keys to safe operations. Aircraft depend on complex electronic systems that can diagnose the slightest deviations and make malfunctions known. Unfortunately, this is often in the form of either an indicator light on an instrument panel or a log message that is accessible only with specialized software or tools.
With Zabbix, all data transfers from the aircraft’s diagnostic system to the responsible employees can happen automatically. Error prioritization and escalation to further levels can also happen automatically if any aircraft has an ongoing issue that remains active for multiple days.
Conclusion
At Zabbix, our goal is a world without interruptions, powered by a world-class universal monitoring solution that’s available and affordable to any business. Our open-source software allows you to monitor your entire IT stack, no matter what size your infrastructure is or where it’s hosted.
That’s why government institutions across the globe as well as some of the world’s largest companies trust us with their network monitoring needs.
Get in touch with us to learn more and get started on the path to maximum efficiency and uptime today!