Once we have secured Zabbix's performance and users are satisfied with it, we can, in advance, think about the use of Zabbix in other areas of the company. After all, Zabbix has enough power to cater well beyond the IT environment.

Since a long time, we have addressed the issue of monitoring more broadly. Some institutes have studies and research showing a trend that companies are now trying to monitor the entire business and not just the infrastructure. This is not a new movement; we have already had significant moves towards it. The good news is that Zabbix fits well in this scenario and can act as a single console for monitoring that may be necessary in the environment, be it infrastructure monitoring or business monitoring.

Now our role is to identify the sponsors of Zabbix in our company. After that, we need to identify what services and business processes need to be monitored by these sponsors. At this point, what is worth our bargaining power, business vision, and political strength to leverage the use of Zabbix in the company?

Certainly, managers and directors need to see the business from the point of view of the systems and technologies that support existing processes. We've mentioned a few times in previous chapters that for many users, it makes sense that a trigger highlights a technical problem, such as a network asset being down or a database with full area.

The Zabbix sponsors in other areas of the company are users, who are not technicians, but will need information about the behavior of processes and services that satisfy the users of their area.

Be it an e-commerce site, a logistics company, hospital, bank, retail or any other business, there will be metrics that can be collected by Zabbix and are not technical. Our aim should be to meet our business's demands and identify the sponsors of each area. After this, we must know the metrics that are important to these users and then make Zabbix work to gather and evaluate these metrics.

The trick is to think of monitoring as a pyramid where the base is formed by monitoring related to physical and logical infrastructure (operational view). The middle portion is formed by the applications, transactions, routines, batch processes, and so on that are supported by the previous layer (tactical view). The top is formed by the final user service, general health of the environment, or other relevant metrics on that level (strategic vision).

The following diagram represents this view:

At each level, we have different user profiles with different requirements. At the bottom of the pyramid (operational view), Zabbix native screens and views are enough. For subsequent layers (tactical vision and strategic vision), we need something more customized, and this will often be achieved with some development using Zabbix API.

The fact is that it is not enough to have technical arguments to convince users who are not technical. We need to find valid arguments for each organizational level. The important thing is to understand that Zabbix can meet all of these requirements and we will not need other monitoring tools in our environment. This makes the operating environment much simpler because the technical teams won't need to know or receive training on various tools.