Mastering Zabbix

Monitor your large IT environment efficiently with Zabbix

Overview

• Create the perfect monitoring configuration based on your specific needs
• Extract reports and visualizations from your data
• Integrate monitoring data with other systems in your environment
• Learn the advanced techniques of Zabbix to monitor networks and performances in large environments

In Detail

Monitoring systems are a crucial part of any IT environment. They can be extremely useful not only to identify specific problems, but also to measure your system’s performance and find the best way to improve it. However, they can be misleading and confusing if not correctly configured and managed. False alarms and missing data can undermine a monitoring system’s contribution to a healthy IT department. Zabbix 2.2 allows you to customize and implement ideas by extending, adding, or customizing functionality, giving an added value to that technology.

This comprehensive guide will help you to make both strategic and practical decisions about the Zabbix monitoring system, so that it will fit your environment and monitoring needs like a glove. From choosing the correct size and configurationto what you should actually monitor, including exporting and integrating your data with other systems, this book will leave you with no doubts about the crucial role of a well configured monitoring system.

Introducing you to methods to configure and choose between high availability and distributed Zabbix architectures for your largeenvironment, this guide will proceed to show you how to gather monitoring data, visualize, and act on it. Next, the guide explores how you can extend Zabbix and connect it to trouble ticketing systems or data mining solutions. You will also learn how to choose the ideal database backend, monitor appliances that only talk SNMP and application servers that talk JMX, and organize your charts and maps in screens that can be visualized on big screens. It shows you how to leverage Zabbix’s discovery capabilities to track your ever changing environment and build complex, intelligent alarms that won’t distract you with trivial problems. Finally, you will learn to expand Zabbix’s capabilities through its scripting facilities, protocol and powerful API.

What you will learn from this book

• Integrate Zabbix in your large or complex environment
• Establish a distributed monitoring solution
• Set up Zabbix and its database in a High Availability configuration
• Collect data from a variety of monitoring objects
• Organize your data into graphs, charts, and maps
• Build intelligent triggers and alarms to monitor you network
• Write scripts to create custom monitoring probes
• Understand Zabbix’s database scheme and harvest data from it
• Automate procedures using Zabbix’s API

Approach

Written as a practical step-by-step tutorial, this book is full of engaging examples to help you learn in a practical context

Who this book is written for

If you are a system administrator or an IT architect and want to know how to better integrate your Zabbix installation with your surrounding environment, this book is ideal for you. A basic, working knowledge of Zabbix is assumed, so that the book can focus on how to take full advantage of every component. The code in the later chapter will be explained in its functionality, but basic programming skills are assumed as well.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Deploying Zabbix
Chapter 2: Distributed Monitoring
Chapter 3: High Availability and Failover
Chapter 4: Collecting Data
Chapter 5: Visualizing Data
Chapter 6: Managing Alerts
Chapter 7: Managing Templates
Chapter 8: Handling External Scripts
Chapter 9: Extending Zabbix
Chapter 10: Integrating Zabbix