What is Zabbix used for?

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform for networks, servers, virtual machines, applications and cloud services, with discovery and alerting. It is a good fit for network infrastructure monitoring, server and VM health tracking, and alerting for IT operations teams.

Is Zabbix open source?

Yes. Zabbix is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at zabbix/zabbix.

Yes. Zabbix is open source, so the software itself is free to use. Paid plans are also available, starting at $325 per month.

Can I self-host Zabbix?

Yes. Zabbix can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Zabbix an alternative to?

Zabbix is an open-source alternative to Datadog, PRTG Network Monitor, SolarWinds Observability and LogicMonitor. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include Netdata, Nagios Core and Checkmk.

Is Zabbix actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Zabbix was on 2 October 2026. The project has 6.4k stars on GitHub.

Zabbix: open-source alternative to Datadog

About Zabbix

Zabbix is an enterprise-oriented open-source monitoring solution for tracking the performance and availability of network devices, servers, virtual machines, applications and cloud services. It scales from a single standalone application up to large distributed environments.

Its feature set covers resource discovery that finds network entities and onboards or offboards devices, metric collection through agents or agentless methods from devices, sensors, operating systems and virtualization platforms, and ready-made templates for monitoring everything from low-level hardware to SaaS services. It also provides alerting on collected metrics and visualization of the data, and it is used for both network and application monitoring.

Zabbix is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and is typically self-hosted on your own servers, backed by a database. The vendor sells commercial support and services around the free software, which suits IT operations teams that want a single monitoring system for mixed infrastructure.

Key features

Automatic discovery of network resources
Agent-based and agentless metric collection
Out-of-the-box monitoring templates
Alerting on metric thresholds
Network, server and cloud monitoring
Dashboards and data visualization

Good fit for

→Network infrastructure monitoring
→Server and VM health tracking
→Alerting for IT operations teams

Built with: Go Template
Tags: monitoring; network-monitoring; alerting; metrics; infrastructure; observability; self-hosted

Zabbix: questions and answers

What is Zabbix used for?: Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform for networks, servers, virtual machines, applications and cloud services, with discovery and alerting. It is a good fit for network infrastructure monitoring, server and VM health tracking, and alerting for IT operations teams.
Is Zabbix open source?: Yes. Zabbix is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at zabbix/zabbix.
Is Zabbix free?: Yes. Zabbix is open source, so the software itself is free to use. Paid plans are also available, starting at $325 per month.
Can I self-host Zabbix?: Yes. Zabbix can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Zabbix an alternative to?: Zabbix is an open-source alternative to Datadog, PRTG Network Monitor, SolarWinds Observability and LogicMonitor. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include Netdata, Nagios Core and Checkmk.
Is Zabbix actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Zabbix was on 2 October 2026. The project has 6.4k stars on GitHub.