Every year information systems become more and more complex, where end-user experience depends on many layers of hardware and software, making management of IT infrastructure and task of keeping high SLA very challenging. Zabbix Monitoring Solution returns to organizations once lost control over information systems, providing smart analysis of current state of IT infrastructure and ability to predict potential failures. Organizations get a clear overview of what is going on with mission-critical applications and have ability to drill-down into every element of the system.
Solutions by Industry
Banking & Finance
Nowadays information systems and applications are the heart and soul of the Banking and Finance industry, fuelled by powerful hardware and robust software. Minutes of downtime here are calculated in thousands and sometimes millions of dollars.
End-user experience depends on performance and availability of many layers of the infrastructure, such as hardware, network devices, system software, user applications. All these levels are integrated and heavily depend on availability of other resources.
Possible uses of Zabbix
A simple use of an ATM machine to withdraw cash within the same bank involves:
- availability of ATM machine as a hardware, including power supply and work of mechanical and electronic elements of ATM
- availability of ATM machine as a software to interact with a customer, including input of the requested amount and PIN validation
- availability of cash in ATM
availability of ATM management application to route requests - availability of network to deliver authorisation request from ATM to the bank and response from the bank to ATM
- availability of a card management system or a module to check the status of a debit card involved in the transaction
- availability of a core banking system to respond to the authorisation request and the requested debit amount from the account
- not to forget proper conditions in the data centres, availability of IT hardware, performance of OS, database, general purpose software and applications, such as firewall, backups and many other elements of payment and IT infrastructure.
This is just a very simple representation of the process, where only the availability of all involved elements will result in delivery of positive experience to the customer, whereas the failure of one element of the chain will result in denial of the service and an unsatisfied end-user.
Zabbix Monitoring Solution enables:
- to collect and store performance and availability information from all hardware and software elements used in the financial industry
- to process millions of checks per minute, considering very complex dependencies between different elements of infrastructure
- to work with distributed architecture, including remote offices, branches, ATM;
- to analyse user experience 24 hours a day, 365 days per year
- to report and notify specific people within departments about any issues or malfunctions.
Zabbix Monitoring Solution can monitor tens of thousands of devices and applications associated with your banking IT infrastructure and system in general to detect and notify if there is a problem or any early signs of a system crash or slow-down.
Government
The key reason, why monitoring is such an essential process for the governmental ministries, is because it enables to do more with less funding. Zabbix Monitoring Solution helps to solve the toughest management problems in IT network, as well as to simplify IT infrastructure, which decreases the costs of the. In the governmental sector, monitoring and data evaluation is the key to management performance and strategic management.
Each year the public services are becoming more oriented towards the online resources and opportunities, so the Governmental sector is now very much dependent on providing availability and good performance of these services. Monitoring process has now become an essential process for all governmental and public institutions, enabling to ensure the stability and continuous work of provided services online.
Possible uses of Zabbix
- monitoring of the availability and performance of different public programs/projects and online resources
- automatic reporting to the public/community about any collected data
- monitoring of availability of utility services, public transportation services, lighting, and many other public services.
Proven benefits
- solution that performs well on the large deployments and does not require significant investments (neither the initial nor later)
- high level of performance, simplicity, application possibilities, and easy to use
- increase in effectiveness of budget expenditures by providing precise and accountable data on how public resources/funds are used
- assistance in justification of investments/expenditures.
Zabbix Monitoring Solution is the best fit for the national and local governments, intending to ensure efficiency of management and required to leverage necessary investments with the available budgets.
Education
Universities, institutes and schools are on the leading edge of technology development and introduction into many different industries. Advance of technology today requires an enormous amount of resources, including extensive IT infrastructures.
Ongoing financial constraints in the public sector constantly challenge educational institutions to find inexpensive, but effective ways to deliver high quality monitoring applications and services. Zabbix open-source monitoring solution can be implemented and used by anyone for free, and yet provide even very demanding customers with broad variety of functions and features.
Uses of Zabbix
- Monitoring all devices (e.g. computers) simultaneously
- Alarm on any data loss in the IT system
- Identify internal system abusers and display their user names and host IP address;
- Integrating Zabbix for institution’s physical, virtual, and cloud environments into one central management console, so everyone in the organization has centralized access to the required information and sources
- Monitoring of internet sources and channels used by students and personnel;
- Monitoring of IT systems for Intellectual Property (IP) protection purposes and notification if such information was spread outside permitted resources
- Early notification of possible viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other transmitters of system infection
- Monitoring of attendance system for educational institutions, where electronic ID cards are used.
Proven Benefits
- Increase the stability of information technology infrastructure and services operated by an organization
- Opportunity to organize proactive problem detection and resolution
- Availability of support application with comprehensive backup and recovery tools
- Ensuring that IT systems provided to students and personnel are used properly and for legitimate purposes
- Early notification of possible IP loss or copy
- Ensuring proper use of institution’s IT systems by involved users
- Reduction of manual work and saving of human resources
- Usage of recorder statistics.
Healthcare & Medicine
Monitoring of integrated IT machines and devices in the hospitals is not only a very important process, but sometimes even critical for saving peoples’ lives. Imagine emergency cases when every second of them takes to receive a patient’s health data & statistics, which may be a question of life or death. Reliable monitoring solution makes the necessary data flow as fast as possible and saves time of specialists for other important lifesaving procedures.
Each medical institution has hundreds of devices and equipment that help to control and show the present condition of patient’s health. Needless to say that the monitoring of these devices and prompt notification in case of any failures or drop-downs is vital.
Another important purpose of monitoring process within healthcare & medicine industries is to prevent any cash losses that can be saved for the medical institutions’ development and support for people in need. In this case, the purpose of monitoring process is aimed at recognizing whether the projected results have been achieved as defined in the health action plan and strategy. According to precisely set IT parameters for monitoring, healthcare institutions are able not only to be aware if these parameters are met, but also have very accurate statistics on what sector(s) or project(s) may have data errors or IT system failures.
Such instant control over any possible drop-downs on the general system help the medical institutions not only to correctly allocate their funds, but also to ensure accurate work of all assigned and monitored IT systems.
Possible uses of Zabbix
- monitoring of all hospital devices and equipment
- alarming on outstanding parameters or any exceptional cases
- management of the monitoring configuration centrally, without having to login to the agent to change or add a monitor
- monitoring progress towards the expected outcomes.
Proven benefits
- delivery of requested data in the shortest time;
- ensuring of instant notification in any possible failures in the hospital equipment;
- saves time and funds that are always needed in medicine sector through very low cost of ownership;
- “embedded” history and trend capacity graphing.
IT & Telecommunications
The key to success of IT and Telecommunication services is the assurance that services are delivered to the customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. Precisely, effective and efficient monitoring is a must requirement in these environments that will: monitor the entire network, troubleshoot problems, control excellence of service delivery to customers, notify agents on any detected errors and problems and point out the affected system area / customer, to ensure rapid recovery. All of these aspects and many others are the fundamentals for IT & Telecommunication companies, if their aim is to be successful and trusted for the customers.
Possible uses of Zabbix
- monitoring of the systems in data center as well as systems for company’s clients
- monitoring of large and expanding WISP network of servers, WiFi infrastructure and users
- tracking of customers’ servers; ability to use maintenance free proxy servers to monitor customers’ networks
- monitoring of day-to-day metrics like disk space, the status of websites, and the availability of key services
- monitoring everything from errors on switch ports to connection pool utilization in Java application servers
- continuous monitoring of all areas ranging from network and routing topology to server hardware through to processes and backups.
Proven Benefits
- consolidated monitoring solution for all alarming and performance related information;
excellent flexibility and scalability - great stability
alerting on “situations unique” to a “specific issue” - very easy in implementation, use and customization
- unfettered conceptual freedom during the implementation phase
- easy to configure and update due to many existing resources explaining how or where to tune or fix problems
- easily monitors any type of vendor or device
- custom graphs, the maps feature, and latest data
- included functionality is sufficient to monitor almost any server and network device
- the ability to expand Zabbix quickly into other situations to help triage and diagnose problems with a less obvious cause
- ability to fix problems before the customer even becomes aware of their existence
- extensive information for decision making in solving problems or bottlenecks in the networks
- active support forums, trigger support dependencies, powerful templating and event engine
possibility to automate the processes - low administrative costs
- increase company’s ROI.
Marketing
Marketing is not only about being creative. It is about planning, doing and checking results constantly. Monitoring process is an important part of marketing strategy implementation that gives fundamental information on how the implemented project/campaign is going. When involved in digital marketing, the flow of data elements is so dense that the use of Zabbix Monitoring solution may become vital for efficient allocation of marketing resources.
Zabbix Monitoring Solution can be easily adapted to marketing content and give the answers on:
- customers’ reaction to promotional campaign or message
- indicators or variables that increase company’s competitive edge
- the level of acceptance and satisfaction of your product/service by target audience
- any other parameters you may think off
Possible uses of Zabbix
- measurement and tracking of effectiveness of company’s marketing efforts
- monitoring of data and statistics coming from multiple users and clients
- automated messages, emails, newsletters on occurrence of some predefined event
- monitoring of activity, customer feedback and campaign effectiveness on multiple social networks at once
- monitoring of online homepage most important real-time data e.g. traffic rankings, on page statistics, number of unique visitors, etc.
- monitoring of campaign effectiveness and comparison with the set goals
- monitoring the efficiency of used marketing resources.
Proven Benefits
- powerful tracking and analytics
- graphical representation of the social metrics important to your business
- quality and consistency of data
- easy to read indicators for marketing teams to drive operations effectively
- possibility to make timely adjustments for the running marketing campaigns in order to accomplish the goals
- assurance that efforts and results align with quantified objectives and conform to the plan
performance encouragement - monitoring is an early warning system, which enables the corrective action.
Solution by Application Area
Access Control Monitoring
As a usual first step, companies start to monitor access control system log files to correlate occurrence of IT system failure with entry to server room, where servers and network equipment are located, or determine a link between open doors and change in temperature in a server room.
Some go further and integrate access control log monitoring with the work shift management system to verify if a person is entitled to enter a server room at a given time or to use dynamic routing of e-mail messages, containing alarms about monitored environment failures, to people who have recently checked in at their desks.
Depending on information that the access system writes to its log files, Zabbix may detect and inform about open doors, inappropriate use of access cards (such as a card being used to exit a room that was never used to enter the room), attempts to use cards that are reported to be lost or stolen.
Integration of access control logs with other monitoring information collected by Zabbix allows companies to do smarter monitoring.
Application Development Monitoring
In a highly dynamic software development environment where improvements to software roll up to production systems weekly or even daily, it can be a challenging task to monitor the quality of development process or code. Problems may be associated with keeping the code clean, controlling memory usage and preventing memory leaks, ensuring that no branches are left behind uncommitted or unused for a long time.
A typical example of such monitoring can be a case of dramatic increase in memory or CPU usage of a web server after publishing a new calculator or other application on the web page. Zabbix enables to compare the resource usage with the number of users on-line. And if such hunger for resources cannot be explained by more happy surfers actively using the new feature, an e-mail can be sent to inform about problems with application.
Business Analytics Monitoring
An IT infrastructure that Zabbix is so good at monitoring never stands alone or aside from the business that it operates for. And any business has Key Performance Indicators (KPI), which enable to understand the state of health of such business. It can be revenues, profit, number of web visitors or number of purchases, amount of devices manufactures per hour. For each company and assigned industry it may be something different and unique. Collecting such information manually and checking against planned numbers is a time consuming task that makes some businesses “forget” to collect and evaluate such valuable information constantly. This may result in a direct loss of revenues or unwise business decisions.
Adding those metrics to Zabbix monitoring takes just a few minutes, but may have a dramatic influence on the company’s financial performance and future development. And, with Zabbix, monitoring is stress-free. There is no need to add and configure hundreds of parameters right away. This can be done gradually by constantly adding KPIs that really matter for the business.
Just think of a manager receiving an SMS at 4:26 PM stating that today’s sales or production plan is fulfilled or seeing a dashboard on a smart-phone showing all key indicators are “green” for today. Zabbix built-in functionality allows easily achieve this by accessing dashboards, screens, graphs, and notifications.
Capacity Monitoring
This is one of the primary tasks that Zabbix is dealing with, but is often forgotten or overlooked by users of Zabbix. Remember, Zabbix has all information about the performance of IT infrastructure and thus is able to report how much resources remain unused.
This information used wisely may allow to “squeeze out” more from your IT resources without spending additional dollars on purchasing new equipment. Or, alternatively, may suggest to dismiss some equipment temporarily or permanently by reallocating systems to unloaded equipment.
Approving budget for the next year without knowing the real need for new servers, network devices, application licenses and other resources may be a tricky and risky task. While having all the numbers at hand will allow you to justify the required expenses and not jeopardise those predictions later on.
Configuration Monitoring
The Zabbix network monitoring solution does not provide configuration management functionality, but it can be easily configured to monitor the configuration of IT environment, making sure systems operate according to the set rules.
As a good example, Zabbix may collect information about software versions and report if any equipment runs on software older than the set. Another use of Zabbix would be to detect applications installed on any server, check it against the list of allowed or required applications, and notify about any deviations.
Some customers of Zabbix go even further and use scripts in Zabbix to install applications at selected devices on the fly.
Inventory Monitoring
With the network monitoring solution from Zabbix it is very easy to monitor the inventory of IT equipment. While most Inventory management systems keep track of devices and applications purchased by organization, only a few of them provide the actual state of inventory.
Let’s say a company has 100 Microsoft SQL or Oracle server licenses. In a dynamic environment it might be hard to keep track of how many are in real use. There can be some unused licenses, which means that there is no need to purchase new ones for arriving equipment. Or the number of installed instances is over the number of purchased licenses, and thus new licenses have to be purchased.
It is also possible to track the number of RAM modules, disks, network devices and desktops, printers and other peripherals in actual use and compare with the official inventory.
Security Monitoring
Who Watches the Watchers?
There are plenty of different security solutions on the market that do complex or very narrow jobs, like network port control, packet content analysis, file and data integrity checks, log analysis and other security actions.
But then there is a human factor or software malfunctions that cause the majority of security breaches. Maybe someone opened a network port for just 1 minute and never remembered to close it. A virus or malicious software altered system files and the control over system is given to outsiders. The password file was altered when it should stay unchanged. The root password was challenged for many times. A server case was opened in remote location.
Users of the network monitoring tool developed by Zabbix feel more secure as all of the required checks can be easily performed by Zabbix and timely notifications sent to exclude security breaches or minimize losses from such illegal actions.
