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Omniglass Omniglass Omniglass

Overview

Omniglass is an opinionated Zabbix distribution built for AV system monitoring. It compiles Zabbix from source with targeted patches, extends it through supported extension points, and packages everything into a single deployable stack with AV-native structure, device drivers, and operator-facing views. It is Zabbix — configured, extended, and ready for AV.

The problem

Section titled “The problem”

Most AV teams do not know precisely how many systems they have, what is in them, or whether they are working at any given moment. The primary reason for this is that AV devices are difficult to monitor: they are agentless, speak non-standard or proprietary protocols, and often lack complete management APIs and documentation. That limits the platforms AV teams can use for data collection, and leaves most teams stuck with manufacturer-specific point tools that only see their slice of the environment.

The result is siloed data, no unified view of system health across rooms or buildings, and no foundation for the kind of reporting that IT and security teams expect. Leaders cannot make data-driven decisions about service quality. Operators cannot produce an auditable record of what is deployed and how it is performing. For anyone who is living with this reality, it is clear that something has to change.

Zabbix is a strong foundation for infrastructure monitoring due to its flexibility in data collection methods, but out of the box it has no concept of AV systems, rooms, or device protocols. While Zabbix is highly extensible and fully open source, most AV teams lack the personnel, expertise, and time required to extend the software to their needs, much less maintain those extensions over time. The barrier to entry is simply too high.

Enter Omniglass: a Zabbix distribution designed for AV, with the necessary extensions built in and pre-configured so that teams can get up and running quickly.

Features

Section titled “Features”
  • Everything in Zabbix, plus AV: Alerting, escalation, SLA reporting, dashboards, SNMP, IPMI, agent-based collection, API integrations, and 25 years of production-grade monitoring infrastructure. Omniglass adds to this; it does not replace it.
  • Systems & locations: Define AV systems (conference rooms, event spaces, signage clusters) as first-class entities with members, types, and parent relationships. Organize them by physical location with hierarchical location types, geographic coordinates, and custom metadata. The control plane reconciles this structure into Zabbix host groups, tags, and service objects automatically.
  • Device protocol drivers: Agentless collection for AV-specific protocols (Crestron CTP, with more planned). Drivers run as Zabbix external checks on the proxy, so collection stays close to the devices.
  • AV-native UI: Front-end modules add a systems explorer, system detail views, and location views directly in the Zabbix web interface. Operators work in a single UI.
  • Reconciliation engine: The control plane watches for changes in Zabbix (host additions, group modifications, template updates) and continuously reconciles Omniglass-managed state. Drift is repaired automatically.
  • Workflow automation: Node-RED is included and pre-wired for synthetic tests, device control sequences, vendor API integrations, and data transforms. Auth plugins bridge Zabbix identity into Node-RED. Every deploy is versioned in the database with diff and restore.
  • Smarter SLAs: Minimum severity threshold for SLA downtime calculation, so informational alerts and low-priority warnings do not count against your service level reports. Submitted upstream as ZBXNEXT-10547.
  • Removable: If Omniglass is removed, Zabbix continues monitoring. All projected artifacts (host groups, tags, items) remain in Zabbix and are self-explanatory.

Where to start

Section titled “Where to start”