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Zabbix isn’t the largest or fastest-growing surveillance platform in the world, but CEO Alexei Vladishev and his team aren’t worried about that. The monitoring software is free, open
Zabbix isn’t the largest or fastest-growing surveillance platform in the world, but CEO Alexei Vladishev and his team aren’t worried about that. The monitoring software is free, open source and particularly popular among manufacturers and users. “Why should we grow like weeds?”
“Zabbix is a free, open-source monitoring solution for enterprises,” says Dmitry Lambert, head of technical support at Zabbix, but that’s not entirely true. “The platform is actually for anyone who wants to monitor.” Everyone, you can take that literally.
In Europe, Zabbix counts major banks, government agencies, retailers and the ESA among its customers. Icann in the US has been using Zabbix to improve the performance of for about ten years Top-level domains (.com, .be, .eu…), but Lambert also knows a man who keeps an eye on the humidity in the flower pots of his wife’s plants for her.
Zabbix is the child of Alexei Vladishev. He started his career at a large organization in the Latvian financial world. “I was a lazy system administrator,” he laughs. Bill Gates once said that there is no one better suited to a difficult task than a lazy person, as he or she will find the most efficient way to complete the task. For example, Vladishev realized that there were no good and affordable solutions for keeping track of his IT infrastructure, so he wrote a few scripts himself.
“These scripts became my hobby project,” continues the CEO and founder. “I released it as open source code and received regular thank-you emails. A single thank you was enough to motivate me for a whole year.” Vladishev received not only thanks, but also requests to add functionality and ultimately offer training on his solutions or help implement them.
Vladishev realized in 2005 that his hobby project was fodder for a company and founded Zabbix. “All company names with combinations of, for example surveillance or view were already taken. Sysmo or netview were checked but proved to be unusable. I then tried letter combinations and Zabbix sounded good,” he says. “I had no idea how big Zabbix would become, but I think the name still works.”
Since its inception, Zabbix has experienced steady and consistent growth with increasing revenue. Today it amounts to more than eleven million euros per year. “Of course we can grow faster with an investor’s money,” Vladishev realizes. “But why?” The CEO has no ambition to give someone with a lot of money control over his child. In this respect, he is an atypical tech CEO. His company has not raised a cent of external money and is growing organically, driven by product quality and customer interest.
Of course we can grow faster with an investor’s money, but why?
Alexei Vladishev, Founder and CEO Zabbix
“Sales are a good indicator of a company’s results,” confirms Sergey Sorokin, director of business development. “But it is far from our most important KPI (central performance indicator). “Our main goal is to make Zabbix as good as possible.”
For this purpose, Vladishev relies on a team of developers working from the headquarters in Riga. “All the development is happening here,” Lambert says. The office itself looks neat but somewhat unremarkable, tucked away in a building in a commercial area on the outskirts of Riga. Walking around outside Zabbix Peak, we notice that everyone who works there gets pies every Wednesday. Well-fortified, the developers get to work using C for the backend and PHP for the frontend, which is highly configurable with visualizations and widgets.
The Zabbix platform is completely open source, but that doesn’t mean anyone can contribute code. “We deliberately do not accept code contributions,” Vladishev clarifies. “We did that in the early days, but then you discover problems or realize that the code doesn’t fit your style. In practice, validation of external code takes so long that it is more efficient to program new functions yourself. We would retain control over quality and compatibility.”
Vladishev also knows very well what he is doing and where Zabbix needs to grow. “We have a vision for the future,” he explains on stage at the eleventh Zabbix Summit to around 400 participants who came to the Latvian capital from 48 countries. “We have a vision for the future and sometimes we really have a better understanding of why something is the way it is.”
That doesn’t make Zabbix any less open. Vladishev, Sorokin and Lambert all insist that anyone can look at the code and work with it for free. “Zabbix has users and customers that we differentiate between,” explains Sorokin. “Anyone can use Zabbix. The platform does not send us telemetry data and we do not require registration, so we have to infer the exact number of users based on the number of downloads and subscriptions in our repositories. There are certainly more than a million worldwide.”
Anyone can use Zabbix. The platform does not send telemetry data to us and we do not require registration.
Sergey Sorokin, Director of Business Development Zabbix
Some of these millions of users are customers. You use the exact same product but pay Zabbix for support. According to Lambert, support is a broad term. “We help customers use Zabbix in their specific environment. Can’t get anything to work due to the complexity of their Kubernetes cluster? We then look at your network and look for a solution.” The price is fixed and linked to an SLA, so there are no surprises for you.
Open not only means that the code is visible and free, but also implies a certain extensibility. External enthusiasts are not allowed to tinker with the source code, but Vladishev and his team ensure that Zabbix is very flexible. “Users can extend the platform in different ways to adapt it to their needs,” he says. “It’s actually universally applicable.”
If Vladishev is the proud father of Zabbix, then he has a big family now. And by that we don’t just mean the over 150 employees spread across offices in Riga, Tokyo, Porto Alegre and Mexico City or the over 250 partner companies worldwide. Zabbix enjoys an active and enthusiastic community around the product.
Surveillance is human.
Sergey Sorokin, Director of Business Development Zabbix
Sorokin has an explanation for this. “Surveillance is human,” he suspects. “Haven’t you ever wondered how many people passed through an intersection? Or how often has it been very warm on an exceptionally warm September day after the summer? This is surveillance. Zabbix visualizes this data in a business context, but of course people are still interested in such data.” The fact that Zabbix is very scalable and works both in a company with tens of thousands of data points and in the home of an engineer who wants to know how often its doors open and close is a bonus.
However, the love for Zabbix is more passionate in some places than others. “We have a lot of users and customers in Japan and Brazil,” says Sorokin. “Something happened from the start that made us very popular, but to be honest we don’t really know what.” In his opinion, the right people seem to have discovered the platform early and shared their enthusiasm in the right places, so that momentum was built early on. “In these countries, every IT professional knows what Zabbix is. In other regions we sometimes still have to explain who we are and what we do.”
In this respect, Belgium, together with the Netherlands, is a fairly mature market. “We have good penetration in both regions and people understand the added value of professional services in addition to the platform,” notes Sorokin. Financial services and telecommunications operators were the first in our region to adopt Zabbix, but he says government organizations and companies in the logistics industry are also fans.
“There are two main reasons why companies choose Zabbix,” notes Vladishev. “First of all, there is the low Total ownership costs. Some competitors regularly increase the price of their licenses, but we do not have any licenses. Zabbix is free for everyone. The price of support is also fixed and we do not plan to suddenly increase it significantly.”
“Then there is flexibility,” he continues. “At large software companies, it is difficult or impossible to expand the platform to meet specific needs. This is possible with Zabbix. It’s even in the DNA of the platform.” He is convinced that this extensibility remains important even with updates where a new version remains compatible with the connected warehouse.
At the conference, Vladishev and his colleagues will explain the future direction of Zabbix. “The demand is great Application performance monitoring, so we will incorporate that into a future release,” he says. On stage, the CEO hints at plans to process more data such as logs and additional telemetry. “Collecting this data itself is not the real challenge,” he adds, “but rather the processing, analysis and visualization.”
Team Zabbix’s top priority is clear. “We want to make the best possible product,” we hear from both Vladishev and Sorokin. “We then want as many people as possible to use our good product,” he continues enthusiastically. “And then business will follow.”
Source: IT Daily
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