Case Study: Fukuoka University achieves scalable monitoring of 43,000+ items and undisrupted campus network operations with Zabbix

Fukuoka University - Customer Case Study

Fukuoka University, one of western Japan’s largest universities with over 20,000 students, needed reliable, low‑cost monitoring for its campus-wide FUTURES network—supporting ~10,000 PCs, ~200 wireless APs and critical administrative services. The challenge was to monitor a diverse, multi‑vendor environment (network gear, VMware, security devices, NTP/AD/VPN), support dual‑stack IPv4/IPv6, avoid recurring licensing fees, and reduce frequent false alerts that forced operators to rely on human judgment.

With IIJ support the university deployed Zabbix on a single virtual server using templates and SNMP Trap integration, plus a clear device naming scheme for fast identification. The solution now monitors ~1,176 devices and ~43,000 items (Zabbix 2.2 on an 8‑core/48GB VM), uses VMware vMotion for platform resilience, and has cut misdetections through tuning. The result is faster, more accurate detection of issues, smoother operations across the campus, and scalable monitoring without per‑expansion licensing costs.

Fukuoka University

Masaru Okumura

Head of the Research and Development Office of the General Information Processing Center