Open source software provider Zabbix released version 4.0 of its open source network monitoring software. The latest version includes more data visualization capabilities, updated agent items, and a boost in performance.

Zabbix started as a hobby project of the company’s current CEO, owner, and product manager Alexei Vladishev. He was working as a system administrator for a Latvian bank and needed a tool for managing the performance and availability of the bank’s network. Vladishev published the first version of his universal software under the open source license called Zabbix in 2001. In 2005, he started a company with the same name to support the platform’s development and provide support services.

The Zabbix open source software provides system administrators with the ability to gather, analyze, visualize, and report on IT infrastructure availability and performance. It monitors the full IT stack — from hardware to the network layer including the operating system layer, log files, middleware, applications, cloud resources, the virtual layer, and more.

Zabbix can collect network data through its native agents or through an agent-less option. Its own native agents are available for most common Linux distros and Windows. Regardless, the data is collected from a central location, the Zabbix server (which runs on Linux), or Zabbix proxies (remote data collectors and aggregators).

It can be made available as a package for Rhel, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, and Raspbian, a virtual appliance, and as source files.

The most recent release of Zabbix made a number of enhancement to improve user experience. This includes a redesigned graphing interface to enhance its visualization capabilities. Zabbix 4.0 also enables the monitoring of external APIs based on HTTP/HTTPS data. It added new data processing options to make the software compliant with assistive technologies and customization capabilities to the dashboard and software.

Zabbix claims an installation user base of 300,000 in 75 countries, with 4 million Zabbix downloads a year. According to Sergey Sorokin, the Zabbix director of business development, the top industries that make up its user base are financial and banking, IT&T, and the government sector. Its headquarters are in Riga, Latvia and it has offices in the United States, Europe, and Japan.