Monitoring with Zabbix

• Advanced FOSS Monitoring

November 13th, 2010
FOSSASIA, Saigon, Vietnam

Walter Heck, Tribily.com

Introduction

• First release in 2001

• Original developers from Latvia
• Scalable: 1-100.000 devices
• Monitor Servers, network devices, applications,
airconditioners, the weather, exchange rates,
whatever you want :)
The importance of Monitoring

• Prevent problems from becoming disasters

• Trend analysis / capacity planning
• Monitor resource usage
Other FOSS options

Ø?
Architecture - simple

DB Server
Zabbix server

Server A Server B
Architecture - proxy

DB Server
Zabbix server

DB DB
Zabbix proxy Zabbix proxy

Server A Server B Server A Server B

Architecture - nodes

Zabbix frontend DB Server

Zabbix server

DB DB
Zabbix server Zabbix server

Server A Server B Server A Server B

Architecture - advanced

Zabbix frontend DB Server

Zabbix server
Viet Nam - Saigon
Cambodia Thailand Vietnam - Hanoi

DB Server DB Server
Zabbix server Zabbix server Zabbix proxy
DB Server
Zabbix frontend Zabbix frontend

Server A Server B Server A Server B Server A Server B

Data gathering

• Active / Passive agents

• Firewalls

• Agentless
• Polling TCP/IP (FTP / HTTP / SMTP etc.)

• SNMP

• WMI

• Historical data
• Detailed (eg. Last 7 days) vs Trends (eg. Last 365 days)
Organising Hosts

• Users and usergroups

• Permissions apply only to usergroups and
hostgroups
• Hostgroups => Hosts => Items / Graphs / Triggers
• Templates
• Can have Items / Graphs / Triggers
• Scalable
Graphs & History

• History
• Look at ‘Raw’ data

• Graphs
• Auto-generated or pre-defined

• Assign to template

• Screens
• Combine graphs and other data into a large display

• Slideshows
• Loop through screens
Alerting & Notifications

• Triggers
• Host discovery
• Arbitrary condition (CPU > 90% for 5mins?)
• Actions
• What to do when a trigger fires?
• Send notification / Execute command
Distributed setups

• Good for remote sites with poor connectivity

• Nodes
• Allow remote sites to administer autonomously

• Nodes have their own admin interface

• Proxies
• Proxies just gather data and forward it

• Save bandwidth/connections

• Mix and match is possible!

WEB Monitoring

• Monitor websites by retrieving pages

• Allows scenarios
• Log in to frontend => go to ‘My Profile’
• Monitor HTTP status codes or grep for text
• Not templatable yet :(
New in 1.8: API

• First version with API, so it’s a work in progress

• Makes external tools easier
• Zabcon (http://trac.red-tux.net/wiki/zbx_api/zabcon)
• Makes external development easier
• Tribily’s drupal module (http://github.com/Tribily)
• Great future for zabbix!
Demo-time!
Questions?
 The End!

http://zabbix.com http://tribily.com
#zabbix on FreeNode walter@tribily.com
@zabbix @tribily