Zabbix and Astra Monitoring: Import Substitution or a Partnership to Boost Productivity
Russia’s IT market is undergoing a fundamental shift – and in monitoring, the real change is not just about replacing tools, but about seeing what actually drives the business.
Russia’s IT market is undergoing a major transformation. After the exit of Western vendors, businesses faced a pressing question: how to monitor infrastructure, applications, and services going forward? Familiar tools such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, and SolarWinds are no longer updated or supported, while switching to new platforms brings risks and long adaptation cycles. According to analysts, more than 70% of companies still rely on open source tools such as Zabbix, Prometheus, and Grafana, and over 70% are not planning to migrate to domestic commercial products. At the same time, 98.4% of large enterprises already use some form of monitoring system. The market is vast, habits are entrenched – so why change anything? The answer lies in a critical gap: most organizations monitor infrastructure, but lack visibility into what is happening at the business level. This is exactly where Zabbix and Astra Monitoring stop being competitors and become parts of the same system.
Why Zabbix Became the De Facto Standard
Up to now, Zabbix still dominates the monitoring tools segment, and for good reason. With more than two decades behind it, Zabbix has built a vast ecosystem around itself. As of early 2026, more than 3,300 job listings on hh.ru require Zabbix skills, and the platform has over 100,000 users worldwide, including Sberbank, Alfa Bank, Rosbank, and many other major Russian organizations.
The primary driver of its popularity is cost – or rather, the absence of it. Zabbix is distributed under an open license (GPLv2 up to version 6.4 and AGPLv3 starting from version 7.0), making it accessible both to small startups and to large enterprises operating tens of thousands of servers. Only support services – technical assistance, training, consulting – are paid, while the product itself can be deployed and used without licensing fees. This model has allowed Zabbix to establish a dominant position, especially in the SMB segment where IT budgets are typically limited.
The second factor is import substitution. When global vendors began scaling down operations in Russia in 2022, Zabbix effectively became the only mature open source platform capable of supporting new monitoring solutions. Building a system from scratch would take years, while businesses needed results immediately. As a result, Zabbix became the foundation for a wide range of local products and industry-specific adaptations.
The third advantage is its extensive professional community. Over two decades, a massive knowledge base has formed: thousands of templates, forums, documentation, implementation cases, and certification systems. Finding a Zabbix specialist is significantly easier than for any comparable tool.
And crucially, for small and mid-sized companies, Zabbix out of the box covers most core needs: monitoring servers and network equipment, collecting CPU, RAM, and disk metrics, and checking availability via SNMP and IPMI. For infrastructures with dozens of servers, this is often sufficient.
The Hidden Cost of “Free”
Every advantage has its trade-offs, and in Zabbix’s case they are substantial. The first, less obvious one is the “viral” nature of its GPL (and now AGPL) license. Any derivative products, forks, or modifications must also be distributed with open source code. Creating closed commercial solutions based on Zabbix violates these terms. Within the professional community, such products are increasingly described as “parasitic” or even “pirated.” Notably, Zabbix developers moved to AGPLv3 specifically to strengthen these protections: now the obligation to disclose source code applies even when modified versions are used to provide services over a network.
The second issue is the level of customization required. In large organizations, Zabbix often becomes not a ready tool but a continuous engineering effort. Its core monitoring model is increasingly misaligned with modern stacks built around microservices, Kubernetes containers, and hybrid clouds. Configuring a system for an infrastructure of 1,500 devices may require around 750 hours of work by a qualified engineer. At rates starting from 3,000 rubles per hour (approximately $30–35), that translates into roughly 2.25–3 million rubles ($25,000–$35,000) – and that is just for initial setup, excluding maintenance and development. Large enterprises like Sberbank or Alfa Bank can afford dedicated teams to extend Zabbix, but for SMBs this becomes prohibitively expensive.
The third limitation is tied to hardware-centric design. Zabbix was originally built for monitoring servers, network devices, and storage systems. Creating templates for non-standard equipment requires significant effort, and out-of-the-box template quality varies widely. Attempts to use Zabbix for full application monitoring, service availability tracking, or business transaction analysis quickly hit architectural limits. As experts note when comparing Zabbix with Prometheus, the former excels in traditional infrastructure scenarios but falls behind in cloud-native and application-centric environments.
Monitoring vs Observability – Why the Shift Matters
To understand why comparing Zabbix and Astra Monitoring as direct competitors is misleading, it is important to look at a broader shift happening across the industry: the move from monitoring to observability.
Traditional monitoring answers the question “what broke?” A server stops responding, CPU usage spikes, a network channel degrades – these are infrastructure-level signals, and Zabbix handles them effectively. Observability addresses a different question: “why did it break, and how does it affect the business?” This requires not only metrics, but also logs and distributed traces, all unified and linked to business context. Observability makes it possible to track every user action – from clicking “Buy” to final payment confirmation – and immediately identify where a failure occurred, how many customers were affected, and how much revenue has already been lost.
Studies show that moving from monitoring to observability can reduce incidents by up to 68% and cut recovery times by 74–75%. It is no surprise that everything is moving in this direction. According to iKS-Consulting, the Russian monitoring market is expected to grow by 11% in 2026, driven largely by observability platforms and predictive analytics.
Astra Monitoring as a Business Observability Platform
Astra Monitoring, developed by Astra Group and included in the Ministry of Digital Development’s software registry, was designed from the outset as an observability platform. Unlike Zabbix, which evolved from infrastructure monitoring tools of the early 2000s, Astra Monitoring is built on a cloud-native architecture, integrating the three pillars of observability – metrics, logs, and traces – within a unified interface.
The February 2026 release (version 1.3.0) introduced full Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with distributed tracing. This represents a fundamentally different level of analytics: the ability to visualize the entire request flow across distributed systems on an interactive service map, automatically display dependencies between components, track response times at each stage, and instantly highlight bottlenecks. Root causes of slowdowns or failures can be identified in seconds rather than hours of manual log analysis. Trace rendering speed has increased 15-fold compared to previous versions, and the interface has been redesigned to make core features accessible in just a few clicks.
The key idea behind Astra Monitoring, however, is not technology alone but visibility into how IT operations connect to financial outcomes. As Ilya Zakharov, Director of the Monitoring Department at Astra Group, explains, modern monitoring should track business operations, not just servers. Adding an item to a cart, completing a payment, issuing a loan, transferring funds – each of these transactions must be measurable: how many users completed it, how long each step took, what error rates occurred, and how requests moved through the system. This context transforms monitoring from a technical tool into something meaningful for executives, including CIOs and other C-level leaders.
The platform’s capabilities for working with traces and logs allow extraction of business context from technical data. For example, from a standard trading system trace, it becomes possible to isolate a stock purchase event and immediately see where the transaction slowed or failed, linked to specific amounts, customers, and timestamps. Many companies attempt to build such systems internally, but the cost and complexity are often prohibitive.
Not Competition, but Integration
Framing this as a “which is better” comparison misses the point. Zabbix and Astra Monitoring address different layers of the IT stack, different users, and different business needs. Zabbix is used by teams responsible for servers, switches, and storage systems. Astra Monitoring is used by those responsible for applications, service availability, and business performance – development leaders, SRE teams, and ultimately CIOs.
The optimal strategy is not replacement, but integration. Zabbix remains a reliable tool for infrastructure monitoring. Astra Monitoring fills a gap that remains largely unaddressed in many Russian organizations: business-level monitoring, application observability, and digital service performance tracking. Before 2022, this layer was handled by platforms like Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic. After their exit, the space effectively opened up – and Astra Monitoring is targeting exactly that gap.
This distinction is critical when communicating with the market. When positioned as “another monitoring tool,” the reaction is predictable: “We already have Zabbix.” But when framed around tracking business operations – understanding how revenue-generating services perform – the conversation changes entirely. It is no longer about replacement, but about filling a critical blind spot. Businesses gain visibility into what they previously could not measure: how many transactions succeeded, where failures occurred, and how much revenue was lost due to delays of just a few hundred milliseconds.
What This Means in Practice
For a mid-sized company already using Zabbix, the choice between “replace everything” and “extend capabilities” becomes a choice between high-risk, high-cost migration and targeted deployment that delivers immediate value. Astra Monitoring integrates with existing infrastructure, supports OpenTelemetry standards, runs on Astra Linux and other Russian operating systems, is compatible with Astra Group’s software ecosystem, and offers flexible licensing based on monitored hosts.
As the platform evolves – adding auto-discovery, expanding SNMP support, and growing its library of preconfigured templates – it is gradually extending into infrastructure monitoring as well. The SNMP module in version 1.3.0 already includes a built-in template editor and automatic decoding of SNMP traps. Over time, this positions the platform to cover both infrastructure and application layers, forming a unified observability system from hardware to business transactions.
The overall value proposition becomes clear: Zabbix provides the foundation – monitoring infrastructure health. Astra Monitoring builds the missing layer on top – visibility into how IT systems impact revenue. Together, they form a comprehensive monitoring strategy aligned with modern realities: microservices, containers, distributed systems, and the growing demand for technological sovereignty.
