Blackboard DevCon 2012 - How to Turn on the Lights to Your Blackboard Learn Environment with Zabbix

How to Turn the Lights
on Your Blackboard
Learn with Zabbix
Noriaki Tatsumi
Manager, Performance Engineering
Blackboard, Inc.

What’s Zabbix?
http://www.zabbix.com/

• Distributed monitoring solution
• GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2
• Alerts, advanced monitoring, trend analysis, data
visualization, actions, RC, JSON API
• Stores data away from production
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite
• Oracle / IBM DB2

2

What can Zabbix do for you?

3

Cannot replace J.A.R.V.I.S. for Ironman

4

Collect service quality metrics

• Uptime
• Response time
• Failure rate

5

Notify you when there’s an issue

• Be the first to know about down time
• Identify problems before the users report
• Get alerted for potential security attack

6

Troubleshoot your environment

• Reduce/eliminate guess work during root cause
analysis
• Minimize time to identify problem
• Measure improvement after introducing a fix

7

Plan sysadmin tasks

• Identify optimal maintenance window
• Hardware projection

8

Measure success

• Institution goals (ex. user adoption)
• Brags

9

Explore data

• Monitor anything!

10

Why Zabbix and not another monitor like Nagios?

• Requires smaller effort to setup
• Better UI monitoring and graphing capabilities
• Template based
• Built-in capability to monitor JMX, log files, Unix,
Windows, SNMP, database, URL, and IPMI
• Easily extensible via agents, plugins, and APIs
• Other cool features like maps, screens, slide shows

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Zabbix Custom Graph

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Zabbix Custom Graph

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Zabbix Custom Screens

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Zabbix Status of Triggers

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Zabbix Custom Dashboard

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Zabbix Network Maps

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How does Blackboard use Zabbix?

• Monitoring and trending operations and statistical data
for SaaS solutions like SafeAssign
• Performance and scalability forensics
• Internal server infrastructure monitoring

18

Zabbix Blackboard Learn Template Suite

• Easy to install
• Requirements
• Zabbix 2.0 and up
• Zabbix Java Gateway
• Extended Monitoring B2
• Available for download on edugarage
http://tinyurl.com/bbzabbix

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• Application
• Java
• Linux / Windows
• Tomcat
• Cache
• ActiveMQ

20

Application

• Statistics
• Sessions (active, inactive)
• Users &Courses (available, unavailable)
• Assessment attempts / hour
• Database connection pool usage
• Security
• Config changes in conf/ folder & system registry database table
• Creation of privileged accounts, Logins from unexpected terminal
• Command-line authentication tool usage

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Application - Sessions

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Application - Security

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Java

• Heap space memory usage
• Eden space memory usage
• Tenured space memory usage
• Survivor space memory usage
• Non-heap space memory usage
• GC collection count
• GC collection time
• Threads usage
• OutOfMemoryError, StackOverflowError
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Java

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Java

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Linux/Windows

• Processor load average
• CPU utilization
• Memory usage
• Network usage
• Disk usage
• File descriptor usage

27

Linux – Processor Load Average

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Linux – CPU Utilization

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Linux – Disk IO

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Linux – Memory

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Tomcat

• Request processor
• Average processing time
• Requests per minute
• Errors per minute
• Thread pool
• Busy
• Current
• Max

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Tomcat

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Tomcat

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Cache (SP10 and above)

• Hit ratio
• Misses
• Hits
• In memory hits
• On disk hits

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Cache (SP10 and above)

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ActiveMQ

• Broker
• Consumer count
• Message count
• Memory usage
• Enqueue/Dequque count
• Queue
• Enqueue/Dequeue count
• Consumer count
• Producer count

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Data sampling and retention

• Sampling interval
• 30 ~ 3600 (1 hour)
• History (raw data)
• 7 days ~ 14 days
• Trend (min, max, avg)
• Stats: 5 years
• Others: 3 months

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Deployment

1. Download at http://tinyurl.com/bbzabbix
2. Install Monitoring Extension B2 for statistics and
security data
3. Upload the templates via Zabbix GUI
4. Deploy agents using the provided script
5. Add hosts and apply the templates in Zabbix via GUI

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Zabbix server deployment options

• Compile from source
• VMware / VirtualBox (.vmdk)
• Open virtualization format (.ovf)
• Live CD/DVD (.iso)
• Preload ISO
• USB stick / hard disk image
• Xen guest

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Zabbix Best Practices

• Define an objective for each item you’re monitoring
• Don’t sample data more than required
• Don’t keep history and trend data longer than
necessary
• Use percentile line on charts where applicable
• Graph all functions (min, avg, max) to indicate outliers
• Don't create triggers that gets ignored
• Self monitor Zabbix server
• Have a maintenance and a backup/restore plan

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Check out Zabbix!

• http://www.zabbix.com
• http://tinyurl.com/bbzabbix

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Blackboard DevCon 2012 - How to Turn on the Lights to Your Blackboard Learn Environment with Zabbix

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