Zabbix: Open Source Network Monitoring

November 13th, 2010FOSSASIA, Saigon, Vietnam

Walter Heck, Tribily.com

•Advanced FOSS Monitoring

Monitoring with Zabbix

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

Ø?

Other FOSS options

Architecture - simple

Server A Server B

Zabbix serverDB Server

Architecture - proxy

Server A Server B

Zabbix serverDB Server

Server A Server B

Zabbix proxy Zabbix proxyDB DB

Architecture - nodes

Server A Server B

Zabbix serverDB Server

Server A Server B

Zabbix server Zabbix serverDB DB

Zabbix frontend

Architecture - advanced

Zabbix serverDB Server

Server A Server B

Zabbix serverDB Server

Zabbix frontend

Server A Server B

Zabbix serverDB Server

Zabbix frontend Zabbix frontend

Server A Server B

Zabbix proxyDB Server

Cambodia

Server A Server B

Zabbix serverDB Server

Thailand Vietnam - Hanoi

Viet Nam - Saigon

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?

http://zabbix.com#zabbix on FreeNode

@zabbix

The End!

http://tribily.com walter@tribily.com

@tribily