Everything is possible! Interview with Zabbix Summit 2019 speaker Wolfgang Alper

Being an experienced Zabbix expert, Wolfgang Alper has implemented a variety of creative projects. At this year’s Summit, his presentation will reveal how “Deutsche Telekom Technik GmbH” integrated lots of Zabbix-Server instances into their existing IBM NetCool ticket system. The main goal was to reuse the entire existing infrastructure and the attached business processes to work with alarms created by Zabbix.

We have asked Wolfgang a few questions about creativity while working with Zabbix.

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Monitoring directory contents

With item pre-processing added to LLD workflow and new javascript pre-processing step, it’s possible to monitor a directory for its file changes.

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Apache HTTP Server monitoring

Apache performance and understanding /server-status metrics

Apache Statistics Module: mod_status

Understanding website performance and Apache uptime should begin with external monitoring, i.e. Zabbix, which allows you to discover problems from a user’s perspective. Such problems involve:

Response timeout – no timely response from the server;
HTTP errors instead of a response;
Slow response – say, comparing to the last month’s average.

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Javascript support in item preprocessing

With new preprocessing steps added to Zabbix in nearly every release, it became obvious that it’s impossible to predict every business case, so we had to come up with a universal solution. This, in turn, raised an important question – which embedded scripting language/engine to use.

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Zabbix, Time Series Data and TimescaleDB

Every monitoring system has to deal with three kinds of performance-related challenges.

Firstly, a good monitoring system must receive, process and record incoming data very quickly. Every microsecond counts here. This may not seem obvious from the start but when your system becomes large enough all the tiny fractions of seconds add up to become seconds if not minutes.

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Zabbix in the subway. Munich Transport Corporation Case Study

Munich Transport Corporation (MVG) is a division of an integrated service provider including electricity, gas and water utilities, as well as transportation services. Providing a daily service used by thousands of Munich residents and tourists, the company seeks for options to detect errors as fast as possible and efficiently deal with them.