Monitoring the community – two years later

Some might recall that back in 2011 we dug into old logfiles and produced a 5 year graph of Zabbix user count in the #zabbix IRC channel. At the same time, monitoring at a higher rate – hourly – was set up, and data collection started. Now that it’s been 2 years since that graph, let’s take a look at the new graph, how the user count has changed in two years and how Zabbix copes with a 7 year graph.

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No more flapping. Define triggers the smart way.

Zabbix trigger expressions provide an incredibly flexible way of defining problem conditions. If you can express your problem using plain English or any other human language, there is a great chance it could be represented using triggers.

I’ve noticed that even experienced Zabbix users are not always aware of the true power of triggers. The article is about defining problems in a smart way so that all alerts generated by Zabbix will be about real issues. No flapping, no false alarms anymore. Interested?

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 7 – Value extracting from logfiles and more

In the previous article in 2.2 series we explored a new ability to extract values from a webpage. This was not the only feature that was extended this way – several other items gained similar functionality – notably, file content parsing and logfile parsing. The latter has been a popular feature request and should be good news for many users.

And now for some more detail on changes for item keys vfs.file.regexp[]vfs.file.regmatch[], log[] and logrt[].

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 6 – Returning values from webpages

Zabbix has allowed to check whether a webpage contains a specific string for a long time – using the web.page.regexp[] agent item one could verify whether page contents match a regular expression or not, and return the matched string. But what if multiple matches were possible, but we were interested in a specific one? There was no built-in way to do that, but it is coming for Zabbix 2.2.

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