Zabbix and Astra Monitoring in Industrial Environments: Competition or Synergy?
Over the past three years, the IT landscape of Russian industry has changed beyond recognition. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, SolarWinds and New Relic have effectively exited the picture: updates have stopped, support has been withdrawn, and licenses can become unusable at any time. Meanwhile, operational demands remain unchanged. A steel plant, refinery or chemical producer still requires continuous oversight of thousands of assets, dozens of IT systems and hundreds of business processes.
Ilya Zakharov
According to ComNews, demand for IT monitoring systems grew by 28% year over year in fall 2024, with industrial companies leading the surge at 32%. iKS-Consulting estimates that more than 70% of organizations continue to rely on open-source tools such as Zabbix, Prometheus and Grafana, with no plans to migrate to domestic commercial platforms. At the same time, 98.4% of large enterprises already use some form of monitoring. At first glance, the incentive to change appears limited.
The answer lies in a structural paradox: most industrial companies have strong visibility into infrastructure performance but limited insight into business processes. This gap defines how Zabbix and Astra Monitoring interact – not as competitors, but as complementary layers within a unified observability stack.
Zabbix in Industrial Operations: Where It Excels and Where It Stops
Zabbix remains a clear leader in infrastructure monitoring. With more than 20 years of development, over 100,000 global deployments and more than 3,300 job listings on hh.ru as of early 2026, it has become a de facto standard. Its user base includes major organizations such as Sberbank, Alfa-Bank, Rosbank, MTS, Beeline and Russian Post.
For industrial use, Zabbix covers core infrastructure needs out of the box: monitoring servers, switches and storage systems, collecting CPU, RAM and disk metrics, and tracking availability via SNMP and IPMI. Its open-source licensing model (GPLv2 up to version 6.4 and AGPLv3 from version 7.0 onward) makes it accessible for both small enterprises and large holdings with tens of thousands of nodes. Costs are limited to support services such as maintenance, training and consulting. This explains why it has become the foundation for multiple industry-specific adaptations. Building a monitoring system from scratch would take years, while operational needs are immediate.
However, cost savings come with trade-offs. Configuring Zabbix for an infrastructure of 1,500 devices can require approximately 750 hours of engineering time, equivalent to 2.25–3 million rubles ($25,000–$35,000) for setup alone, excluding ongoing maintenance and development. Large enterprises such as Sberbank maintain dedicated teams to customize Zabbix, but for mid-sized industrial companies, this approach is often not economically viable.
Zabbix was fundamentally designed for infrastructure monitoring. Attempts to extend it to full-scale application performance monitoring, service availability tracking or business transaction analysis quickly run into architectural limitations. As industry experts note, Zabbix performs exceptionally well in traditional server environments but is less effective in cloud-native and application-centric scenarios.
For industrial enterprises, where IT systems are tightly coupled with production workflows – including MES, ERP, logistics platforms and warehouse management systems – this limitation becomes critical.
Industrial Reality: Why Infrastructure Visibility Is Not Enough
Russia’s industrial sector is undergoing large-scale digital transformation. According to TAdviser, by 2024 the share of locally developed IT solutions in critical industries such as defense, metallurgy and energy reached 60–70%. Operators of critical information infrastructure are required to complete import substitution by January 1, 2028. The highest demand is concentrated in control and monitoring systems, including MES, SCADA, data platforms and predictive analytics tools.
A few examples illustrate the shift.
Severstal is developing an MES platform for metallurgy and mining within its industry competence center. A prototype was deployed in its own discrete manufacturing operations in 2023, with plans to roll it out across Norilsk Nickel, OMK, MMK and TMK once development is complete. At the same time, the company is building a data warehouse based on Arenadata products, replacing SAP.
Norilsk Nickel, in partnership with Digital Horizon, is developing the Magma software suite for mining operations, covering design, planning, visualization and operational control. Pilot deployment is expected in 2026–2027.
PhosAgro has migrated more than 2,000 employees to AstraLinux and plans to expand the rollout to 7,000 users by 2027, covering data centers and all production sites.
Tsifra Group has developed a standardized MES platform for chemical enterprises, already deployed at Apatit (PhosAgro’s Cherepovets chemical cluster). For GAZ, the company delivered a unified digital environment integrating PLM and MES/MDC systems.
All of these developments point to one thing: rapidly growing IT complexity. A modern industrial enterprise is no longer just servers and switches – it is an interconnected environment of MES, ERP, SCADA, logistics platforms, predictive analytics systems, IIoT gateways and microservices. Zabbix can show that an MES server is running at 95% CPU load, but it cannot explain why production order processing latency increased from 2 to 15 seconds or quantify the resulting output loss.
From Monitoring to Observability: A Structural Shift
To understand why comparing Zabbix and Astra Monitoring as direct competitors is misleading, it is essential to examine a broader industry shift – the transition from monitoring to observability.
Traditional monitoring answers what failed. A server goes offline, CPU usage reaches 100% or network performance degrades – these are infrastructure-level signals, and Zabbix handles them effectively. Observability, however, addresses a different question: why it failed and how it impacts business operations. This requires not only metrics, but also logs and distributed traces, all integrated and linked to business context.
In industrial environments, this distinction translates directly into financial impact. Consider a steel plant where an MES platform begins to lag: data transfer latency between production planning and warehouse systems increases from 200 milliseconds to five seconds. Zabbix may still show all systems as operational. Meanwhile, delays in shipping documentation create bottlenecks in finished goods inventory, leading to losses of hundreds of thousands of rubles per hour.
Research indicates that adopting observability practices can reduce incident frequency by 68% and cut recovery time by 74–75%. For industrial facilities, where downtime of a rolling mill or conveyor line can cost millions per hour, these improvements translate into measurable financial gains.
Astra Monitoring: Bridging IT and Business Performance
Astra Monitoring, developed by Astra Group, was designed as a full observability platform from the outset. Its cloud-native architecture integrates the three core pillars of observability: metrics, logs and traces.
A key milestone was release 1.3.0 in February 2026, which introduced full application performance monitoring with distributed tracing. This enables end-to-end visibility across distributed systems, including interactive service maps, automated dependency mapping, response time analysis and real-time bottleneck detection. Trace visualization performance improved 15-fold compared with previous versions.
However, the core value of Astra Monitoring lies not only in its technology stack but in its ability to link IT performance directly to financial outcomes. In modern industrial environments, monitoring is no longer about servers alone – it is about tracking business operations in real time.
Industrial Use Cases: Where Observability Changes the Game
Below are specific scenarios where the integration of infrastructure monitoring and an observability platform becomes critical.
MES – ERP – Logistics Chain
In a large metallurgical or chemical enterprise, production data from MES must flow in real time into ERP systems to generate shipping documents, and then into logistics platforms for transport planning. Zabbix provides visibility into the health of the servers running these systems. However, if latency occurs at the integration layer between MES and ERP – for example, due to an inefficient SQL query or a backlog in message queues – infrastructure monitoring will not detect it. An observability platform with an APM module, by contrast, visualizes the full lifecycle of a production order and immediately identifies the exact point of failure or delay.
Predictive Analytics and Maintenance
Maintenance and repair management systems generate massive volumes of telemetry data that must be collected, analyzed and correlated with SCADA systems and IIoT sensors. Zabbix can collect equipment metrics via SNMP, but correlating events across predictive analytics platforms, MES and ERP – and linking them to business outcomes such as downtime costs or lost production volume – requires a full observability platform.
Migration to Domestic Software
When a large enterprise migrates thousands of workstations to a domestic operating system while simultaneously replacing SAP with local ERP platforms, it becomes critical to monitor not just infrastructure, but application behavior in the new environment. Performance degradation in 1C or custom-built modules may not be visible at the server level but can severely impact business operations. Astra Monitoring, with prebuilt integrations for AstraLinux, ALDPro directory services, RuPost email, RuBackup backup systems, Termidesk VDI and support for OpenTelemetry, enables performance tracking at the level of specific business transactions – order creation, payment processing and warehouse operations.
Industrial PCs and Edge Computing
Monitoring industrial computers used in oil and gas, energy and transport – often deployed in harsh field conditions – illustrates another gap. Zabbix can determine whether a device is operational, but an observability platform goes further, analyzing how process visualization applications handle sensor data and whether performance degradation affects operator decision-making in real time.
Internal Service SLA Management
In enterprises with mature IT infrastructures, IT departments operate as internal service providers governed by SLA agreements. Business units are not concerned with CPU utilization at 40% – they care that a shipment request is processed in three seconds rather than thirty. This level of visibility is precisely what observability platforms deliver.
Not Competition, but an Architectural Stack
Choosing between Zabbix and Astra Monitoring is like choosing between a foundation and a roof: without the former, the structure collapses; without the latter, it remains exposed. The two systems serve different roles and audiences within the IT landscape. Zabbix is used by teams responsible for servers, networks and storage systems. Astra Monitoring is used by those accountable for applications, service availability and, ultimately, financial outcomes – including development leaders and SRE teams. Strategic IT discussions increasingly begin at the CIO level.
The optimal strategy is not replacement, but integration. Zabbix remains the foundation for infrastructure monitoring, while Astra Monitoring adds the missing layer – business-level monitoring, application observability and digital service performance tracking. Previously, this layer was covered by platforms such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics and New Relic. Their exit has left a significant gap.
This distinction matters in how the platform is positioned in the market. When a platform is presented as just another monitoring tool, the typical response is predictable: “We already use Zabbix – why add something else?” However, when the focus shifts to tracking business operations – how revenue-generating processes perform in real time – the conversation changes. Companies begin to see what was previously invisible: how many orders are processed on time, where failures occur in the MES – ERP – logistics chain, and how much output is lost due to even a five-second delay in integration layers.
What This Means for Industrial Enterprises
For industrial enterprises, the model is straightforward: for companies already using Zabbix and considering next steps, the choice between “replace everything” and “extend what works” becomes a strategic one. Full replacement implies high costs and unpredictable risks, while targeted integration delivers immediate value.
Astra Monitoring integrates with existing infrastructure, supports OpenTelemetry standards, runs on AstraLinux and other domestic operating systems, and is compatible with the Astra Group ecosystem. Its licensing model is flexible, based on the number of monitored hosts. For operators of critical infrastructure, it is also important that the product is included in the official registry of the Ministry of Digital Development and complies fully with regulatory requirements.
At the same time, the platform continues to expand its infrastructure monitoring capabilities. The SNMP module in version 1.3.0 introduced a built-in template editor and automatic SNMP trap decoding. Version 1.2 added anomaly detection and intelligent alert tuning to reduce false positives. Over time, this evolution enables the platform to take on part of the infrastructure monitoring workload as well, forming a comprehensive observability system – from industrial controllers to business transactions.
The resulting model for industrial enterprises is clear: Zabbix provides the foundation by ensuring infrastructure health, while Astra Monitoring adds the critical layer – visibility into how IT processes affect production output, logistics and financial performance. Together, they form not just a toolset, but a unified monitoring strategy aligned with modern industrial realities, including MES platforms, microservices, IIoT, edge computing and the growing demand for technological sovereignty.
