Network Monitoring with Zabbix, Prometheus and Grafana: Complete Stack

Modern network monitoring stack: Prometheus + Grafana + SNMP Exporter + Telegraf. An open-source alternative to commercial solutions such as SolarWinds, PRTG and Zabbix. Scales to 10000+ devices. Rapid adoption in 2026. Deployment guide.

Stack Components

• Collection: Telegraf, SNMP Exporter, gNMIc
• Storage: InfluxDB, Prometheus, TimescaleDB
• Visualization: Grafana
• Alerting: AlertManager, Grafana Alerts
• Incident management: PagerDuty, Opsgenie

Protocols

• SNMP v2c/v3: traditional polling
• Syslog: network device logs
• NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX: traffic flow analysis
• gNMI streaming telemetry: modern push model
• REST APIs: Meraki, FortiGate, Panorama

Prometheus

• Pull-based time-series DB
• PromQL: query language
• Storage: local or remote (Thanos, Mimir)
• Exporters: SNMP, blackbox (probe), node (server), etc.
• Primary target: k8s + applications, but adaptable to networks

InfluxDB + Telegraf

• InfluxDB: a time-series DB alternative to Prometheus
• Telegraf: multi-plugin collection agent
• SNMP plugin: traditional metric collection
• Excellent time-series performance

Grafana Dashboards

• Prebuilt dashboards: Grafana.com/dashboards
• Panels: charts, gauges, tables and heatmaps
• Variables: dynamic (device, interface)
• Alerts: conditions that trigger notifications
• Templating: 1 dashboard for N devices

Critical Metrics

• Switch/router CPU and memory
• Interface: bps, pps, errors and drops
• BGP neighbor status
• OSPF/IS-IS adjacencies
• Temperature, power and fans
• QoS drops per queue
• SLA: ping latency, jitter and loss

Alerting Best Practices

• Actionable alerts (not informational alerts)
• Severity levels: P1 (critical), P2 (major), P3 (minor)
• Escalation: PagerDuty → on-call engineer → manager
• Alert fatigue: tuning is essential
• SLO-based alerts (Google SRE)

Order from OPTINOC

Open-source monitoring stack deployment: Prometheus + Grafana + Telegraf. Custom dashboards. Alerting. Quote within 48 hours.