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Monitoring with Zabbix

Competa Conference Center31st May 2011

Raymond Kuiper

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Monitoring with Zabbix

Our agenda for today:

About me

Zabbix Architecture

Retrieval of information

Monitoring and alerting

Lab Excercises Task 1 – 2

Break

Data visualization

Advanced features

Lab Excercises Task 3 – 5

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About meAbout me

Raymond Kuiper

Infrastructure Specialist at Competa IT

Owner / consultant at Qixia

Cisco / Linux guy

Working with Zabbix since 2006

http://nl.linkedin.com/in/raymondkuiper

RaymondKuiper

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Zabbix Architecture

Zabbix monitoring environment consists of:

Zabbix Servers (daemon)

Database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.)

Zabbix frontend (php)

Zabbix Proxies (daemon)

Zabbix Agents (daemon/service)

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Zabbix ArchitectureBasic setup:

Frontend(PHP)

DatabaseZabbixServer

Host

Host

Host

Host

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Zabbix Architecture Distributed setup:

Frontend(PHP)

DatabaseZabbixNode 1

Host

Host

Host

Host

Frontend(PHP)

DatabaseZabbixNode 2

Database

ZabbixProxyHost

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Zabbix Architecture

Differences between Zabbix Proxy and Zabbix DM node:

Proxy is easier to maintain (no local configuration on proxy)

Easy to setup (auto creation of DB on proxy)

No alerting from proxy

No local administrator access (no frontend) on proxy

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Retrieval of information

Zabbix can monitor hosts and devices via:

Zabbix Agents (active and passive)

SNMP (v1, v2, v3)

IPMI (hardware monitoring)

Simple checks (ping, tcp connections, etc.)

Web (actively look at webpage content)

External scripts (server side)

Zabbix trapper scripts

Telnet / SSH checks

ODBC (monitor databases, Beta and undocumented)

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Retrieval of information

3rd Party extensions:

Zabcat (JMX Zabbix bridge)

Orabbix (Oracle)

Postbix (PostgreSQL)

MySQLbix (MySQL)

Zbxlog (Syslog)

….

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Monitoring and alerting

How the monitoring 'cascade' works:

Hosts (IP / DNS based)

Items (What values to retrieve)

Triggers (When is a value worth noticing)

Events ( Occurence of trigger activity)

Actions (What to do when a event occurs)

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Monitoring and alerting

Hosts:

Object that needs to be monitored

Connect on IP / Hostname

Can be grouped in 'Host groups'

Can be linked to (multiple) 'Templates'

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Monitoring and alerting

Items

Identified by a 'Key'

Can contain numerical or textual values.

Are based on Zabbix Agent / SNMP / IPMI / SSH / Telnet / Simple Checks / Scripts / Calculation / Zabbix Internals / ODBC (beta)

Contain timer settings like update interval and history retention period.

Can be grouped in 'Applications'

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Monitoring and alerting

Triggers

Use logic to interpret item values

Can check against things like min, max, avg or last value

Textual recognition based on string or regex

Also a lot of other things like dates and times can be used for comparison

Can become quite complex, but are very powerful

Outcome is always numerical! (It's like math)

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Monitoring and alerting

Events

Trigger state change and duration

Are logged for future reference or audit

Can be acknowledged

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Monitoring and alerting

Actions

Work on the basis of conditions

Send out (repeated) notifications

Run scripts on hosts

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Lab Excercises

Complete these tasks

Task 1: Configure a new host

Task 2: Using Templates

Break

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Data visualization

Different methods

Graphs

Maps

Screens

Reports

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Data visualization

Graphs

Normal, Stacked or Pie

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Data visualization

Maps

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Data visualization

Screens (can be bundled in slide shows)

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Data visualization

Reports

Bar graphs, IT Services (SLA)

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Advanced Features

Zabbix provides some advanced features to ease monitoring.

Web monitoring (monitor websites)

Discovery / Auto registration (automatically add hosts to monitoring)

Maintenance periods (disable monitoring for a host during specific times)

Inventory (CMDB like information)

XML import / export

API (JSON)

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Lab Excercises

Complete these tasks

Task 3: Web monitoring

Task 4: Zabbix Trappers

Task 5: Daunting tasks if time will permit it

Thanks for attending!