Why I Built ZbxWizz

Turning Zabbix Admin Nightmares Into a 2-Month Success Story

There’s a special kind of dread that hits you when someone says:

“We need to clean up Zabbix... all of it.”

At that moment, I realized this wasn’t going to be a casual tweak or a few scripts — this was going to be a deep dive into the guts of our monitoring setup, one host at a time.

I was working as a Zabbix admin, overseeing a deployment with over 7000 monitored hosts. The task:

• Review each host with its designated owner
• Reassign them to correct host groups
• Clean up and apply standardized tags
• Ensure everything made sense and nothing broke

In theory, this sounds like a project management checklist.In practice, it was like juggling spreadsheets, API calls, and mild existential dread.

Our Initial Strategy: Spreadsheet Sorcery

Like many before us, we turned to our trusty old combo:

• Excel files filled with VLOOKUPs and conditional formatting
• Copy-pasting JSON snippets from the API
• And a folder of Python and Bash scripts with names like fix-tags.py and why-wont-this-run.sh

This hybrid approach worked… sort of.It let us do visual review and automation — but neither part was particularly pleasant.

It was messy. It was fragile. And most importantly, it was not reusable.

At some point, while manually matching hostnames to owners for the 43rd time, I muttered:

“There has to be a better way.”

Enter ZbxWizz

That frustration gave birth to a tool: ZbxWizz.I built it with one goal in mind — to help humans make structured changes in Zabbix without losing their minds.

ZbxWizz is a visual, scriptable data tool built specifically for Zabbix.You can:

• Import hosts from Zabbix via the API or load a CSV file

• See everything in a structured, editable table

• augment the current data set with additional data pulled from Zabbix

• Apply JavaScript transformation logic (e.g. tag hosts based on group or IP)

• Review before applying

• Update Zabbix with confidence or just export the data into a CSV file

All of this without writing brittle scripts for every little change, and without switching between five tools and four windows.

Real-World Test: 7000+ Hosts, One Project

Once ZbxWizz was functional, we put it to the test — on the same cleanup project that inspired it.

• Importing host data?
• Assigning new groups with a rule-based script?
• Mass editing tags based on hostname patterns?
• Exporting changes with one button press?
• Fighting with CSV delimiters or broken scripts?

We finished the full reorganization — 7000+ hosts reviewed, grouped, tagged, and standardized — in under three months.

That might not sound like a huge feat, but anyone who's worked with Zabbix in bulk knows:

Finishing a host reorg without rage-quitting is a small miracle.

From Internal Tool to Open Source Project

After the success of that project, I knew other admins out there were facing the same kind of pain.That’s why I decided to release ZbxWizz as open source — to help fellow Zabbix users save time and frustration.

I don’t pretend ZbxWizz is perfect. But it:

• Solves real problems
• Has a flexible architecture
• And gives you power without asking you to memorize the entire Zabbix API

If that sounds good, give it a spin.

🔗 ZbxWizz on GitHub:👉 github.com/your-link-here

Want to Contribute?

There’s a lot I still want to build — presets, dashboards, integrations with other monitoring systems, maybe even a plugin system. But I can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all alone.

If you’re:

• A Zabbix admin tired of fighting with scripts
• A developer who likes data tools
• Or just curious about building things that save time

Come join the fun.Open an issue. Submit a PR. Or just try the tool and tell me what broke 😅

Thanks for reading — and if you ever find yourself staring at an Excel sheet thinking “there has to be a better way”... now there is.

— Sergiu, Creator of ZbxWizz