Monitoring
Difficulty: Advanced
11 min read

Zabbix: IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Learn how to deploy Zabbix to monitor your infrastructure: server installation, agents, templates, triggers, alerts and dashboards.

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What is Zabbix?
Zabbix is an enterprise-grade open source monitoring solution. It lets you monitor your entire IT infrastructure: servers, network equipment, virtual machines, applications and cloud services. Zabbix collects metrics, detects anomalies and alerts you in real time to guarantee the availability of your systems.

Prerequisites

Before starting the Zabbix installation, make sure you have the following:

  • Linux server: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or Debian 12 (64-bit architecture recommended)
  • Database: MySQL 8.0+ or PostgreSQL 14+ (PostgreSQL recommended for large environments)
  • Web server: Nginx or Apache with PHP 8.0+
  • Minimum resources: 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, 50 GB of storage
  • Privileges: root or sudo access on the server
  • Network: Port 10051 (Zabbix Server), port 10050 (Zabbix Agent), port 80/443 (Frontend)
Sizing
The required resources depend on the number of monitored hosts. For more than 500 hosts, plan for at least 4 vCPU, 8 GB of RAM and SSD storage. For very large environments, use Zabbix Proxies.

Zabbix architecture

Zabbix is built on a modular architecture made up of several components:

  • Zabbix Server: The central component that receives monitoring data, evaluates triggers and sends alerts. It is the brain of the system.
  • Zabbix Agent: A lightweight daemon installed on each monitored host. It collects local metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network) and forwards them to the server.
  • Zabbix Proxy: An optional intermediate component that collects data on behalf of the server. Ideal for remote sites or distributed environments.
  • Zabbix Frontend: The PHP web interface used to configure monitoring, visualize data and manage alerts.
  • Database: Stores the configuration, the metric history and the events. MySQL or PostgreSQL are supported.

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Written by

Morgann Riu

Cybersecurity and Linux administration expert. I share my knowledge through free tutorials and training to help system administrators and developers secure their infrastructures.

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