The document provides an overview of Zabbix, an enterprise-level monitoring solution that has evolved over 12 years, highlighting its integrated features such as data retrieval, alerting, and historical data storage. It discusses various functionalities like custom low-level discovery, alerting mechanisms, performance improvements, and its ability to scale efficiently. Zabbix is presented as a flexible, open-source tool that supports diverse use cases and boasts a broad user base across multiple industries.

1. The enterprise class monitoring solution
for everyone

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Today's topics
● Zabbix overview
● We met 2 years ago – what's new?
● Uncommon uses

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2 years for Zabbix
● Zabbix 2.0 out in May
● 13 maintenance releases of 1.8
● 2 conferences and a branch in Japan

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Zabbix – mature by now
● Developed since 1998
● First public release in 2001
● 12 years old next April

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True open source
Open
Core

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What's included
Integrated solution
● Data retrieving
● Historical data storage
● Official web based frontend
● Alerting, discovery
● More

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Components
Server
Database Frontend

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Native agent

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Choose the direction
Server
Active
Passive
Request: CPU load
Response: 1.95
Request: List of checks
Response: CPU load, Diskspace...
Free diskspace on / : 13GB
CPU load : 4.32
Fan 5 RPM : 3524
CPU 1 temperature : 34

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Agentless methods
● TCP checks
● SNMP
● IPMI
● SSH, telnet

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Advanced methods
● Calculated
Total – free = used
● Aggregate
Total free diskspace for all fileservers
Average qps for all database servers
5000qps 1000qps 9000qps
Aggregate value = 5000 qps

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What's a problem?
● Extremely flexible problem conditions
– Functions last, min, max, avg, delta etc
– Comparison, math, boolean logic
– Check multiple values across several hosts
● 6 severity levels

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Templating
Template_MySQL MySQL server
Queries per second
{Template_MySQL:qps.avg(300)}>5000 {Server:qps.avg(300)}>5000
Graph
Queries per second

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Low level discovery
● Agent – filesystems, network interfaces
● SNMP tables (interfaces, anything)
● Custom

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Custom LLD data
{
"data":[
{ "{#FSNAME}":"/sys", "{#FSTYPE}":"sysfs"},
{ "{#FSNAME}":"/proc", "{#FSTYPE}":"proc" },
{ "{#FSNAME}":"/", "{#FSTYPE}":"ext3" },
{ "{#FSNAME}":"/home", "{#FSTYPE}":"ext3" },
]
}

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LLD is awesome

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It really is

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Automatic inventory
● Hardware chassis details
● CPU frequency, vendor, model...
● PCI/USB device list
● MAC addresses
● Operating system name, architecture
● Installed package list

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Multi-homed hosts

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Alerting
● E-mail
● SMS
● Jabber/XMPP

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Escalations
E-mail to
first level techsupport
SMS to
second level techsupport
E-mail to
second level techsupport
E-mail to management
(if not acknowledged)
E-mail to management
Restart service
(if not acknowledged)
Restart server
via IPMI
Toggle power
Via UPS

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Alerting conditions and contents
● Flexible conditions
● Include useful information
● Customise per recipient

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Bundled frontend
● Monitoring
● Visualisation
● Configuration

24. © Teresa Watts

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Graphing

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Graphing extended

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Mapping
Map © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY-SA

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Icon mapping

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Management interface

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Visible host name
● Supports UTF8

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Remote environments...

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...can be a problem

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Solution – Zabbix proxy
Zabbix proxy

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DMZ – passive proxy
Zabbix proxy

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Web monitoring –
now over Zabbix proxy
Active
Zabbix proxy
Passive
Zabbix proxy

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Monitoring Java applications
Apache
Tomcat
GlassFish
?

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Java – easy with Zabbix
Zabbix Java gateway
Apache
Tomcat
GlassFish

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OpenFire heap memory

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Zabbix Java gateway heap memory

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Mix proxies and gateways
Zabbix proxy
Zabbix Java gateway
Apache
Tomcat
Zabbix Java gateway

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Extendability
● Run any command on the agent or server
● Run any command in response to events
● Feed timestamped data in Zabbix
● No language restrictions

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Scalability
● Server, proxy and agent are written in C
● Server
– Real world installations with 40K-80K hosts and
more
– Processing thousands of values every second
– ...or > 2 million values/checks every 5 minutes

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Server improvements for 2.2
● Configurable amount of processes
– Pollers
– Trappers
– ...
● In 2.2 - timers

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Agent scalability
● Agent
– Uses less than a megabyte of RAM (736K on
64bit; excluding shared libraries)

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Performance improvements
● Server
– More caching
– Actually, lots more caching
– Optimised database access

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Performance improvements
● Proxy
– Data sending
– Long-term use

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Performance improvements
● Agent
– Memory usage

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Upgrade policies
● No database changes in one major release
● All old agents supported
● Automatic database upgrade coming in 2.2

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Popularity
● Japan, Russia, Brazil...
● Financial, ISP, government,
manufacturing...
● Other open source projects

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Uncommon uses
● Some examples back from 2011, first Zabbix
conference in Riga

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Monitoring users on IRC

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Weather forecast

58. OpenStreetMap licence agreement

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Serious bug

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Zabbix is..
● Flexible
● Scalable
● Rapidly improved
● True opensource

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Communication and community
● www.zabbix.com
● blog.zabbix.com
● #zabbix on Freenode
Questions?