Nobius keeps business above the clouds with Zabbix

Do you consider that using a cloud vendor’s infrastructure, platform or application services, means that monitoring isn’t so important.
OK
But who’s problem is it when the service that your customer wants to consume is degraded or downright unavailable?

 

Maybe you can impose penalties on the vendor, but isn’t that just more effort, and where’s your reputation going and?

 

 

 

 

Even the big guys have issues.
When companies like NetFlix and Uber get hit and their business going down equates to mega dollars, they can probably stomach the losses (maybe).

 

You and I probably don’t have their deep pockets.

 

 

 

So NO we think cloud monitoring  CAN’T be ignored.
It needs your attention.

 

 

 

 

 

Now those same cloud service provider vendors you subscribe to will also provide you with monitored data. Amazon provides CloudWatch.
Microsoft provides Azure Monitor and so on..
But ask yourself what is their business, and you’ll see quickly its to make money.

 

A peek at their monitoring advice and solutions for example here shows that they have vastly improved their approach over the last 10 years or so, but now there are so many monitoring options it’s a real project to work out what you need.

 

 

 

And surprise, their monitoring is like everything else, its not free.

 

 

 

When you delve into their solutions you’d be daunted by the growth of the number of needed subscriptions, the ticket expands alarmingly.
Also if their service goes down, how will their monitoring alert you?
Can you trust it to?

 

At Nobius we suggest that when your apps depend on their services, you ought to have enough monitoring in place yourself to be able to detect on which the side the issues lie.
Your business will probably have some form of contingency to stop it hurting your own business, but being forewarned is better than hearing nasty things from your irate customers.

 

Another aspect touches on DevOps.
In this case specialists and IT4IT architects will outline that traditional monitoring tools don’t cut it, that agile requires monitoring-as-code for example.
What they forget is that most people have “legacy” resources (requiring traditional monitoring) as well.

 

 

 

Finally yet another “use case” of this trend or change is the latest generations of containerization and orchestration tools over the last few years.
One bright young developer told me that for him containerization was needed everywhere and that it did away with the heavy need for monitoring in his opinion. He said that if his application crashed, its Ok the container management system would restart it. Great I said, that way the service to the customer can be maintained.
His smile showed he was delighted to have convinced me.
But, I continued, what happens if it falls again. And again. Again.

 

Even if it doesn’t straight away, each time it IS restarted, you through away the historical data that helps to identify what happened just before it crashed.
Our conversation about this situation went on longer than I want this blog to, and yes we reached an agreement on compromises concerning monitoring changes that are needed.

 

I hope these use cases serve to outline how much things change and that cloud monitoring is important as any other IT Monitoring.
Yes it needs to morph from straight forward monitoring of resources and become more service orientated to help IT operations transform their processes and focus on the overall service delivery and customer experience. It means that monitoring needs have changed as cloud native apps and end to architectures with them AND legacy support the business and its “reputation “.

 

So where do Nobius and Zabbix come into this you might be asking yourself.

 

 

 

Well there’s a lot of news underlining that IT budgets are typically not increasing.
If that’s true for you, which part of the IT budget can be reduced to cater for solutions to address the above trends including the budget cuts and frugal spending?
Tough?
Well we think, that’s where Zabbix plays a trump card. Its free.
Now before you laugh at me and say “Ian, nothing is free” (to which I agree with by the way), consider how much you are currently spending annually on licenses for software that’s doing monitoring.
Do a quick think, write down a figure and look at it.
That sum of money you can recover because Zabbix is free i.e. no licenses.
It does ALL the monitoring you’re likely to need now and well into the future.
In a few lines you’re going to see examples of how others have gained value from it for cloud monitoring.
But if free makes you nervous and you think you will

 

• have to go it alone,
• need geeks and students to set up,
• only be able to get best effort support from a linked community,

 

then none of those are the case with Zabbix (though some can be helpful).
That’s where Nobius comes in too.

 

First off I’d like to tell you that Gartner Peer Insights report labelled Zabbix as customer choice #1 in their July 2019 report. 
You can get that report from our web site here.

 

 

 

When it comes to cloud monitoring, IT Central Station have gathered user reviews and according to their report that Nobius is providing, Zabbix comes out top, #1

 

 

 

What this should tell us is first that Zabbix really works.
Second its cloud monitoring capabilities match and surpass many well-known branded solutions but WITHOUT their costs. Third there are many successful implementations of Zabbix concerning cloud services from the providers
I’d like to point you a few of them.
Those I have chosen here not so much for the details they are efficient in providing, but more to help you see how well people are using Zabbix for cloud monitoring

 

1. First is a presentation by Andrea Fancellu and Enrico Barbera. 
Andrea and Enrico describe a real life case scenario how they implemented their resilient, fully automated, fully integrated with Zabbix, AWS monitoring plugin, using a key AWS scalable component.

 

  

 

 

 2. Next up is a different topic where Sumit Goel of Salesforce.com shows aspects of “Monitoring Cloud Applications Using Zabbix”.

 

 

 

3.Finally see Daisuke Ikeda of ITS Inc describe his approach to advanced systems operations in a multi cloud and container-based environment.

 

 

 

 

 

Look closely at these and you’ll see they are from Zabbix conferences, and some describe work started 5-7 years ago.
I think this shows that the domain of cloud monitoring using Zabbix is quite mature.

 

Zabbix integrations with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, and many other cloud VIP technologies exist, are proven.
They are continuously extended thanks in part to the experience and contributions of many users in some of the 3000 000+ implementations world wide.
These and more presentations show that it isn’t because Zabbix is free that its evolution is slow, on the contrary, the community is large and the developers are constantly adding new features in an agile fashion.

 

The reports I am presenting in this blog should help you even more to consider Zabbix open source software for Cloud Monitoring, and they expose to you a lot of quite honest and convincing customer user reviews to introduce it.

 

Here’s a quick extract

 

 

I think this is an impressive performance compared to these some of the biggest brands in the IT Industry for cloud monitoring.
And by the way the other 4 solutions in this short list all force you to “own” the products i.e. licenses. #Zabbix doesn’t.
It’s open source and free to download and use!!

 

At Nobius we know these are an important subset of recurrent requirements across many projects we’ve seen.
We also know how switching to a “free” IT Cloud Monitoring solution can be so impactful.

 

With #Zabbix #Nobius crafts solutions that are trustworthy, resilient, scalable, modern, reliable, extensible, and cloud ready. We created #Nobius to help customers deploy and integrate #Zabbix fast.

 

Maybe you are also sensitive to the Red Queen effect.
If so you may be interested to read “The Razor effect” blog by my colleague Dave Collier.

 

 We also have a few other blogs that we recommend

They also bring you reports on server monitoring, network monitoring and open source support

 

 

 #Nobius is the #1 #Zabbix partner in the UK and Ireland
We’d be delighted to consult with you on architecture design, specific requirements, proof of concept, and even #Zabbix-as-a-service offerings to suit your project needs.

 Our video introduces you to the different services that we can offer.
#Nobius staff are certified #Zabbix professionals.
We know how to exploit the best features of #Zabbix into your solution and we have secure H.A. clustered solutions in the cloud ready to get you started very fast.

If you still want Zabbix’s skin in the game and optimize your solution, then as a #Zabbix partner, we can include their experts in your project, organize training for your staff delivered by #Zabbix experts and activate tailored #Zabbix support contracts.

The report I’ve mentioned here is based on unbiased user reviews.

According to IT Central Station ~66% of B2B tech buyers read these reports before making a purchase.
Can you really afford to be a part of the other 33% who don’t? It might be the most important 15 minutes you spend this week.

Get these reports now @Nobius website and learn more about #Nobius services using #Zabbix.

See why Nobius is the #1 Zabbix partner in the UK and Ireland.
Reach out to us on our website or at sales@nobius.co.uk for more information and assistance.