Zabbix

It is open-source. This allows for the person responsible to learn a lot with respect to monitoring. As a training tool, it brings trainees up to speed on a lot of concepts quickly. As an open-source tool, it delivers on when compared to its paid alternatives. Setup is relatively easy for an open-source project. The interface is modern, clean, and easy to navigate. Support for popular platforms is wide from operating systems to firewalls and everything in between. Setup is relatively easy for platforms such as operating systems. It can be up and running in less than 15 minutes. The reporting function is excellent with beautiful graphics that show you what you need to know. There are more than enough options for notifications with email, SMS, Teams to mention a few. There is a lot of functionality and documentation before the option to pay for support. Forum support is high and assistance is relatively quick.

Some of the errors do not provide enough information to troubleshoot issues. Documentation regarding firewalls needs to be updated as some of it is several years old.

It's open-source! What isn't to love about a high quality, highly configurable, high functioning IT management tool that is 100% free. Besides the fact that it's open-source and free, the Zabbix platform is incredibly configurable, meaning it's not one shoe fits all. It can be 100% customised to work for your specific needs in your unique business/IT setup.

The only thing I would really like, is an officially supported Zabbix mobile app. Although some awesome developer out there has done one themselves, which I've used in the past, one that was properly supported and integrated securely with Zabbix itself would be amazing as someone in IT on the go.

Zabbix has so many preconfigured templates for servers and service profiles. Is easy to extend and adapt to monitor and alert in new and different ways. Presents a clean dashboard of problem alerts, can track system inventory and can autodiscover hosts and devices. It has become an essential tool for us and is the heart of our business.

I would like to see it able to run in a leaner hardware profile. Obviously if we're monitoring hundreds of machines we need storage space and cpu/memory to do so, but it can be resource hungry.

Zabbix is the best open-source monitoring tool that allows me to customize templates as I want to monitor any server and desktop operating system and set different threshold limits for alerts by simply editing the xml file.

Not only operating systems, It allows me to monitor VMware ESXi hosts and also the enterprise network devices such as Routers, Switches and Access Points as well.

With Zabbix, I have tried to monitor Cent OS, Ubuntu OS and Windows 10 OS using SNMP and I have noticed that it takes more time to identify services that are running in the OS (Some times it takes more than 1 hour) and also it can identify only few services with SNMP.

But later-on, I have installed Zabbix agents to all the 3 operating systems and then add them to Zabbix server. Then the server started identifying all the host services with in seconds. So, my recommendation is to always use Zabbix Agent if it is available for the client.