Zabbix
Shares rank 11 of 16 observability platforms by recommenders
Free, mature monitoring tool that people trust for servers, VMs and containers, with native high availability and self-checks. One critic said it scaled poorly.
Free, mature monitoring tool that people trust for servers, VMs and containers, with native high availability and self-checks. One critic said it scaled poorly.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 78%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 3.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Mature, battle-tested classic tooling
“Zabbix, Nagios, Munin -- practically everything that existed before: understood this.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “which is indeed more battle-tested”
Comment from 7 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Kula – Lightweight, self-contained Linux server monitoring tool” “use "classic" tooling in a team”
Comment from 26 Aug 2026 in “One Go binary, one YAML file, one SQLite database: I wrote my monitoring tool” Early warnings and built-in self-checks
“warns me about the problems way before even the $job one does”
Comment from 8 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?” “Zabbix solves this with native HA and self-checks.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”
Other observability platforms people recommend
The four most recommended other observability platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana | 71 | 41 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| Prometheus | 48 | 24 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Datadog | 40 | 39 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| Sentry | 31 | 30 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| ZabbixThis page | 7 | 2 | 78% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
8 of the 10 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“warns me about the problems way before even the $job one does”
“use "classic" tooling in a team”
“Zabbix, Nagios, Munin -- practically everything that existed before: understood this.”
“Zabbix solves this with native HA and self-checks.”
“we abandoned it because it scaled poorly”
“which is indeed more battle-tested”
“Zabbix still looks like a better solution by any metric.”
“Zabbix has native support for monitoring VMs and Docker containers, including support for discovering newly spawned ones”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.