Network / NMS
Zabbix
Zabbix SIA
The open-source "Swiss Army knife" — SNMP, agents, IPMI, traps, web checks, triggers; scales to 15k+ devices and a proxy architecture built for distributed sites.
- Category
- Network / NMS
- License
- Open source
- Deployment
- SaaS or self-hosted
- Cost
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Self-host effort
- Heavy
- Maturity
- Incumbent
- Popularity
- ≈5.9k GitHub stars; massively deployed
The catch
Power comes with a steep config burden — templates, items and triggers are fiddly, the UI is dense, and "free" means you're the integrator and operator carrying real ops overhead.
Monitors
NetworkServersMetricsLogsCloudK8s
Protocols
SNMPIPMIWMISyslogICMP / ping
Capabilities
AlertingDashboardsAutodiscoveryTopology mappingAPIConfig as code
Built for
Mid-marketEnterpriseSRE / DevOpsHomelab
The honest take
The usual answer to “how do I leave SolarWinds without going cloud-native.” The proxy model is genuinely great for multi-site networks; budget a few weeks to climb the template/trigger learning curve before it feels good.
Pricing in the real world
- Software $0
- Commercial support $10-30k/yr (large org)
Cost = your time + optional support contract ($10-30k/yr typical for large orgs).