How To Articles
JMX monitoring with Zabbix is easy using Zabbix Java gateway. Let’s say you have a JMX-enabled Java application running on some host. You start the Java gateway, configure Zabbix server to use that, add that host in Zabbix frontend, set up a JMX interface and create a JMX agent item (described here). A JMX item key name is (surprise-surprise!) jmx and it needs 2 parameters that describe a monitored entity:
For quite some time now Zabbix has been offering a virtual appliance for those who would like to try it out or have a simple deployment for a small environment. Among other virtualisation solutions, users also run it on VirtualBox. But, when using NAT in VirtualBox, the host of the virtual machine cannot connect to the appliance directly. Let’s explore how this can be solved.
Continue reading “Connecting to the Zabbix appliance in VirtualBox”
Often host level maintenance is too much. Picture a machine running multiple services: While one service has a scheduled downtime, others continue their work and you want to be alarmed about them. Zabbix has no maintenance on trigger level at present, but you can work around it quite easily.
Continue reading “A workaround for trigger based maintenance”
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!
Here at the University of Hawaii at Manoa ITS department, we recently began using Zabbix. Before adopting Zabbix, we monitored our resources with a loosely integrated mix of several software components, including Cacti, MRTG, and uPortal. Having used this old system for quite a while, we have a considerable amount of data which is valuable for trending. So how do we switch to this great Zabbix system but retain all of our trending statistics? The instructions here describe how to convert data from either Cacti or MRTG and import it directly into Zabbix. Continue reading “Importing legacy Cacti/MRTG data into Zabbix”
Zabbix has proven itself successful as an IT monitoring solution when there is a need to oversee the health of hundreds and thousands of servers. However, there is no reason to think that such a powerful system can only do just that – monitor computers. In the first such post today, we will try to uncover the potential of how Zabbix can be used in a multitude of different ways.
