There’s always the open and true spirit around each open source community. The same goes for the Zabbix community – it is generously sharing knowledge and helping other members become smarter and more advanced.
How to spread the word?
When being a part of an open-source community, you might have this mindset – if I get this great software (Zabbix) for free, what can I do to help it develop, grow, become greater?
Part of our community already contributes. There are advanced and helpful solutions, integrations, templates, scripts, etc. Plus, we are having great authors who share their knowledge via YouTube videos, blog posts, and other channels.
Our community force drives Zabbix development forward and also helps everyone to jump on the same train. Countless Telegram, Discord Reddit groups, and forums for advanced Zabbix experts or just newcomers gather and help each other to get ahead of both – simple and complicated tasks.
While the current community already knows Zabbix’s strengths and possibilities, we invite you to share your revelations with the broader public. And the easiest way is through review sites. These often are the first stops for every sysadmin that starts to explore the monitoring world.
If you have something to say about Zabbix – submit your review at Gartner, IT Central Station, G2, Capterra, Trustradius, SoftwareReviews or any other review site that you find the most compelling. This is a great way how to say thanks for the review site that maybe once have helped you for the first time meet Zabbix.
Share your contribution
This year we introduced our community with the next step contribution – contributor agreement. Zabbix 5.0 LTS version came with an opportunity – finally, legalize your contribution and become an official part of the Zabbix product. Sounds very formal, but it actually was a very quick and simple step for our smart minds to formalize the relationship. Make your template, plug-in, or a webhook included in the official Zabbix distribution by following few steps: sign Zabbix Contributor Agreement (ZCA) zabbix.com/developers, make Zabbix Pull Request: https://git.zabbix.com. Zabbix Dev Team will review and accept if everything is fine. Congratulations! Your solution is officially supported, and thousands of Zabbix users are thankful for your effort! It’s that simple. We are grateful for all our community members that have already contributed their work. Since the 5.0 launch, we have received 10 agreement proposals, four have been accepted, one rejected, and the rest are now being reviewed. To clarify what we are talking about – the first idea came from one of the most active and involved community members, or let’s say it honestly – a leader – Ilya Ableev, who is actively participating, creating Telegram groups for finding solutions and organizing meetups in Moscow. He contributed the Telegram plug-in. Other samples are from our partners – PostgresSQL, Signal4, iLert.
Blogs and vlogs
Part of the community’s shared knowledge comes from Zabbix advocates and evangelists keen to pass over their accumulated knowledge of Zabbix. This can cover How-to manuals, technical explanations on a specific topic, case studies of Zabbix real-life usage in different enterprises, or even interviews with Zabbix practitioners. If you have gathered good knowledge and would like to spread it across Zabbix users’ family, email us, and we’ll figure out whether we can work on a blog post or video. This is one of the most common ways. And it can work out also as a use case that is published on our website.
Meetups & online peer groups
If you are not a big fan of writing or recording but enjoy live discussions with common-minded people, Meetups are the perfect fit. Before the COVID pandemic, Meetups were a place where you could meet your neighbours, share your expertise, and learn a new one from your peers. Now, when the global situation has been changed, for almost a half a year, we are focusing on online meetups – there’s no restriction from which city you are, you don’t have to drive to a special location. Just tune in and watch. You can also register to become a speaker yourself. If there isn’t a special Call for Paper announcement, just ping the Marketing team your idea. Here’s a few years old “How to organize a Zabbix meetup” video with a few most active community members sharing their insights.
And yes – Meetups are organized not only in English. You can find the perfect match by choosing a specific language, you feel more convenient to deliver your speech. One great example of recent online Meetups is Zabbix francophone community with their unnamed leader Steve Destiville who actively engage in community discussions, organize meetups in French, has created the Zabbix francophone community, and is willing to do more.
The most popular and widely used form of interaction with other Zabbix users is Zabbix forum. There you can
Apart from real-time online meetings and other events Zabbix users are passionate about different peer groups online – Telegram as the most popular one. There are lots of local Telegram groups dedicated to a specific region or language. One of the most active Zabbix regional community – Russian speaking users with Ilya Ableev has created even two channels – one for Zabbix beginners and the other one for Zabbix pro users. So depending on your knowledge level, you can ask more advanced questions to the experts’ group or not being ashamed of asking some trivial questions as a Zabbix beginner. The same is for Zabbix Latin American community, that has various groups of different Zabbix knowledge or interests. Here you can explore and join Zabbix channels.
Undefined and creative initiatives
An excellent example of how creative a community can be is the experience of Zabbix Brazilian users. The local Zabbix enthusiasts organize various creative Zabbix-dedicated events to share Zabbix benefits and make the monitoring solution more popular. For example, Zabbix GirlZ live meetup, organized by Zabbix Certified Expert and Zabbix GirlZ Leader, Patrícia Ladislau Silva, where experienced Women in IT from Brazil shared their monitoring experience. This initiative is supported not only by female IT enthusiasts but also by other Latin American Zabbix experts. And this engaging group also has its Telegram channel. Very engaging activity, already 3rd time in a row, organize Zabbix enthusiast Jorge Pretel and Zabbix trainer Robert Silva (both representing Zabbix Certified Partner JLCP) – the Zabbix Marathon. It is a unique event attracting lots of attention and raising the question. During these marathons, both authors show one live Zabbix instance working 24/7 and explains different issues, show the infrastructure, and how Zabbix can handle different situations. If you understand something in Portuguese – we very much encourage you to join and experience this event.
And even books
The most challenging of all contributions seem to be Zabbix books. But it’s just for us – those who haven’t written a single book. As one of Zabbix experienced trainer Patrik Uytterhoeven explains in his lightning talk– it only takes some more time after your working hours 😊. Not sure if this is something we can encourage our users, but the amount of Zabbix related books speak for themselves. And we are aware of at least one new book that will be coming out next year.
To sum up, there are dozens of ways to contribute if you feel you want to share your knowledge. If you are already familiar with Zabbix stuff – feel free to share your creations and thoughts, and don’t hesitate to contact us – we are always open to new ideas and initiatives.
