Category: How To

How To Articles

Zabbix 3.4: Mass data collection using Mercury and smartmontools as an example

As we have already mentioned earlier, there are new opportunities for mass data collection in the latest Zabbix version – Zabbix 3.4. Now let’s dwell on this functionality in more detail, and in order to make it more clear, we will tell about it in two examples:

  • one-time collection of the data received in JSON with the console: Mercury 236 electric power consumption meter
  • collection of hard drives and SSDs S.M.A.R.T. attributes obtained in tabular form with smartmontools.

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Shape Your Own Zabbix

Sharing information is an integral part of today’s world. We need to be able to have access to important data and be able to share it with other people. With the release of Zabbix 3.0 we are keeping up with the times and meeting the needs of users, by introducing personalized maps, screens and slide shows, with the ability to share them with other users and user groups.

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Zabbix 3.0 – Being in Control Never Looked So Good

One of the main highlights of the 3.0 release of Zabbix is a much awaited visual overhaul of the front-end interface. Our main effort was to introduce a more lightweight, less cluttered UI and not alienate our users. Sure, there may have been two approaches: a radical redesign and an incremental change with every future release. We think that the right approach for us lies in between with one special ingredient added to the mix: understanding what our users want and how they use Zabbix. We believe this approach will fundamentally improve the quality of the interface we ship with our product

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Staying Ahead of the Storm with Trend Prediction

Let’s imagine you fancy a walk in a park. You look out of the window – it’s a lovely sunny day, the skies are clear, birds are flying high… So you dress up and head to the park. Halfway to the park the wind starts to blow, the sky becomes overcast. At this point you start to regret that you have not taken an umbrella with you. You have to turn around and get back home as fast as you can, but at this point you have already no chance to stay dry… Where have you missed your step? You did not check the weather forecast before you left!

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How to Install CentOS 6 for Zabbix

The very first alpha versions of long-awaited Zabbix 3.0 were available for testers already some time ago. Now we are getting much closer to the final release of Zabbix 3.0 with the new 3.0 beta available for everyone. Many people would like to give it a try, but sometimes a nice tutorial helps to understand all concepts involved in this process.

In this tutorial a basic Zabbix 3.0 instance will be installed on a virtual testing environment hosted on a laptop, but with some modifications all steps can be applied to an environment of any size.

This tutorial might look a bit out of context regarding Zabbix, but we do hope that it will be useful for at least a few people that are having their first steps in Linux world and would like to give Zabbix a try.

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Maps for the lazy

Creating complex maps is a time-consuming job. Actually, even designing a rather small map of 25 elements can take you an hour. That’s time you rather want to spend on something useful or fun, unless you’ve got a fetish for repetitive work. All we need to automate this task, is a network/graph library like Networkx and the Zabbix API.

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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 any more. Interested?

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“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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