Author: Alexei Vladishev

Author of Zabbix, founder of Zabbix Company

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 any more. Interested?

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 10 – Support of loadable modules

Zabbix comes with an impressive list of supported metrics for virtually all platforms. It covers the monitoring of performance and availability of OS including CPU, memory, network, processes, files, kernel parameters and more. Zabbix also performs agent-less checks for well-known services such as FTP, SSH, IMAP, POP3, HTTP, TCP, etc.

Extending Zabbix functionality is a trivial task thanks to user parameters (agent metrics) and external checks (agent-less monitoring). It is just a matter of adding a new line into the configuration file of the agent and you have a dozen of new metrics supported. Depending on security settings you may also use system.run[], which does not require any changes on the agent side.

It works very well, but it has one major drawback, namely fork(). Zabbix has to fork a new process every time it handles a user metric, which is obviously not good for performance. It is not a big deal normally, however it could be a serious issue in case of monitoring of embedded systems, a large number of monitored parameters or heavy scripts with complex logic or long startup time.

Zabbix 2.2 comes with support of loadable modules for extending Zabbix agent and server without sacrificing performance.

Loadable modules

 

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Getting started with Zabbix API

Zabbix API starts to play significant role especially when it comes to integration of Zabbix with third-party software like configuration and incident management systems as well as for automation of routine tasks. It is incredibly difficult to manage monitoring of thousands of hosts without some automation in place!

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Zabbix Conference postponed to Autumn 2011

Zabbix Conference 2011 postponed to Autumn 2011…

We’ve been doing all our best to organise the conference closer to Zabbix birthday, April 7. Now it looks very much that we do not have enough time to make it happen. There are a number of reasons, and probably number one is our current hard work on Zabbix 2.0, which takes all our time and resources.

So, a few days ago I realised that the best solution would be to postpone the conference, focus on Zabbix 2.0 and have more time for preparation in a nice and calm atmosphere, hopefully.

Anyway the decision was made. Zabbix Conference 2011 was postponed to Autumn 2011, no precise date is set yet. Please stay tuned for further announcements.

On behalf of Zabbix Team I apologise for any inconvenience.

Database performance monitoring with Zabbix

I spent a couple of wonderful days at FrOScon 2010 conference recently. I was mostly interested in NoSQL track due to possible implementation of a high performance storage for Zabbix historical data. However after a few presentations I realized that the topic requires more in-depth research, there are so many NoSQL engines around each with its own functionality and feature set.

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