“Why on earth was I not notified?!”

“Why on earth was I not notified?!” — ever heard that question from a fellow worker? Setting up notifications can be a challenge — and not only for beginners. Normally, debugging such cases is cumbersome, complex and requires a good understanding of how Zabbix works. Were you ever asked for a list of people who would be notified on some event? It’s hard to tell, until the event actually happens. Or at least it used to:

The Action Simulator tries to relieve you from these problems and make you and your co-workers happy again.

Update: Presenting the Action simulator at the Zabbix Conference 2013

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 2 – Templated web monitoring

Continuing with the series on upcoming Zabbix 2.2, the second feature we will look at will be related to the built-in web monitoring that has been available in Zabbix for quite some time already. One problem some users faced – there was no way to use the extensive Zabbix templating system for web monitoring. This was not an issue if all we wanted to monitor were standard websites, but as soon as there would be a large amount of identical webservers, one would have to either do a lot of manual configuration or some scripting via the Zabbix API. Zabbix 2.2 will greatly simplify this by providing templatable web monitoring.

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 1 – Automatic database upgrading

Zabbix currently is at version 2.0, and this version took quite a long time to get out – almost 2 and a half years. Of course, all that wait was not in vain – Zabbix 2.0 provided a huge amount of new features. It did mean that you and me had to wait for quite some time before benefiting from those features, though, so there will be an effort to make Zabbix 2.2 happen sooner. Let’s start to look at the improvements Zabbix 2.2 will provide – and let’s start with the one that everybody upgrading will notice – automated database schema upgrades.

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