Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials

Installing Zabbix on a server requires a few steps. Use the software appliance to get a working Zabbix system in just minutes.

• Install VirtualBox on your computer
• Download and import the appliance's image from the Zabbix website
• Start the software appliance and log in to find out the administration URL 

The web interface may look confusing at first. Find your way around it easily.

• Log in to the web interface
• Learn about the items in the navigation menu
• Understand the automatic breadcrumbs 

The dashboard is very useful. Understand its widgets and configure it as you like.

• Understand the widgets shown on the dashboard
• Use filters to limit what you want to see
• Add bookmarks and scripts to simplify things 

You can install either from source or using binary packages. Learn where to find the needed files.

• Learn about the advantage of binary packages
• Get Debian's binary packages
• Learn which software component serves what purpose 

Now that you have the binary packages, let us see how that gets you a working Zabbix server.

• Install the binary packages
• Prepare a MySQL database
• Make sure the Zabbix server process is running 

To configure Zabbix, you need access to the web interface. Install the frontend package and configure it.

• Install the web frontend package
• Access the web interface 

Before you can monitor items, you need a host. Enable monitoring on the Zabbix server itself.

• Install the Zabbix agent on the Zabbix server and check the configuration file
• Enable monitoring of the Zabbix server itself
• Verify that the host is being monitored successfully and look at the recorded data 

To gather information about system parameters, you need to add items first.

• Add a new item to the Zabbix host
• Learn where to look for item results and verify that the item works
• Watch the item's result change as you create the test file 

Items do not carry information on which value range is wanted. Add a trigger to define the range of acceptable values.

• Define a trigger telling Zabbix that we expect the test file to be present
• Check the state of a trigger in different views
• Create and remove the file to verify that the trigger works 

Configuring a trigger is not sufficient to make Zabbix send you an email. Configure media and actions to do that.

• Set up e-mail delivery using the media configuration
• Set the admin user's email address in the personal profile
• Enable the default action and trigger it to get an alert e-mail 

Before you can add items or triggers, you first need to create a host.

• Learn what properties a host has
• Add a new host and set its properties
• Export and import hosts and mass-update hosts 

Adding many hosts manually is tedious. Use network discovery rules to add hosts automatically.

• Add a new discovery rule
• Add an action to assign Linux servers to a host group
• Leverage values from the Zabbix agent to classify hosts automatically 

Cloning hosts copies the attached entities. Use templates instead to avoid repetition.

• Clone a host and see how attached entities get copied
• Move entities into a template and link it to a host
• Edit items in templates to change the item for all linked hosts 

Taking services down for maintenance will trigger alerts and mess up your uptime statistics. Set proper maintenance periods to avoid that.

• Learn why maintenance periods are superior to disabling hosts
• Set up a proper one-time maintenance period
• Trigger an alert, watch it in the triggers view, and notice that it does not trigger an alert 

To gather useful information from servers you have to define items in Zabbix.

• Create a new item to measure context switches per second
• Quickly explaining the parameters . 

Keeping track of many items may become hard. Use the filter feature to find what you are looking for.

• Find the filter feature in the items view
• Learn how to filter the items view to find desired items easily
• Use mass-update to change multiple items at once 

Zabbix keeps a history of recorded items. Learn how to access the data in the web interface and use ad hoc graphs.

• Find the list of monitored items in the Latest data view
• Access the history of an item as a graph or raw data
• Navigate a graph by zooming in or jumping through time periods 

In special cases, you may need to add items that are not supported by the Zabbix item. Add a UserParameter to create custom items.

• Create a sample shell script that gathers and prints data
• Add that script to the Zabbix agent as a UserParameter. Verify it using the zabbix_get command
• Add the item to a host in the web interface 

Adding items for varying items like network interface or disk partitions is tedious. Use automatic discovery instead.

• Learn where the item discovery gets its information from
• Skip unwanted items by leveraging regular expressions
• Observe how Zabbix automatically discovers disk partitions and creates items and triggers 

Often, hosts need to be checked in different ways or with different trigger thresholds. Use user macros to define particularities of your hosts.

• Learn about macros that Zabbix provides by default
• Add a user macro to a template
• Override the user macro for a specific host 

Items do not tell whether their result is good or bad. You need to use triggers to tell Zabbix which results depict a problem situation.

• Understand the purpose of triggers and find their reference documentation
• Examine a trigger's expression and other properties
• Verify the state of triggers in the overview, events, and triggers views 

Sometimes, certain outages can cause lots of triggers to fire. Configure proper dependencies to avoid a flood of messages.

• Learn how trigger dependencies can save you from getting spammed with alert messages 

Triggers do not send out messages to system administrators. Add an action to make Zabbix alert you.

• Understand how actions are run
• Explore the available types of conditions an action can have
• Learn about the operations that a Zabbix action can run 

Sometimes you have a known workaround for a certain situation. Leverage remote commands from actions to fix things automatically.

• Add an item and trigger to monitor an unreliable web server process
• Add an action that tries to start a web server when it crashes; if that fails repeatedly, inform the system administrator again
• Verify what actions Zabbix has run by checking the events and audit views 

In a team of system administrators, it might not be clear who is working on a certain issue. Leverage the acknowledgment feature for that purpose.

• Acknowledge an active trigger in the dashboard
• Modify the default action to enable escalations
• Understand the steps of an escalation plan 

Actions can only send messages to contacts if Zabbix knows how to do that. You have to configure media types first.

• See what default media are supported by Zabbix
• Use the default script template from the Zabbix documentation
• Add the script as a new media type 

The default configuration only contains a guest and an administrative account. Create more accounts to let other people access Zabbix.

• Learn about the settings of a user account
• Learn about the different authentication systems and how passwords can be verified with an existing LDAP user directory
• Understand that permissions are connected to user groups 

Sometimes you need a user with restricted access. Create a new user group to assign the desired permissions.

• Create a new user group that has read-only access to a set of servers
• Create a new user account that is assigned to that group
• Log in as the new user and see that the desired permissions apply 

Browsing through data and graphs does not give you a good overview. Create your own screens that contain the information you want to show at a glance.

• Create a new screen and learn how to manage rows and columns
• Learn how to add, arrange, and customize widgets on screens
• Explore the available kinds of widgets that can be used on screens 

The current status of your infrastructure may not be clearly visible. Create maps to get a good visual overview.

• Create a new map and learn about the properties of a map
• Learn how to use the visual editor. Explore the elements that can be added to a map. Add hosts and show their status
• Create links between hosts and connect their appearance to the state of a trigger. Use context menus on the hosts 

Maps are good for overviews. You can even make them more detailed by printing actual data on it using macros.

• Edit a map and enable the display of macros
• Understand the syntax of host macros to leverage them in maps
• Add host macros to hosts and links