Technical

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 […]

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.

The Monitoring -> Latest data page in the Zabbix frontend allows to see values for items. Items are grouped by application (if assigned), and they can be expanded and collapsed. Previously, any such operation would result in a full page reload. 2.2 will make this operation happen without a page reload.

In several previous articles in the Zabbix 2.2 series we already discussed several improvements for web monitoring – the ability to template it, customise the amount of retries and the ability to specify an HTTP proxy on the scenario level. There’s more – in 2.2 it will also be possible to parse content from a […]

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 […]

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 […]

So who cares about monitoring the environment?

Exciting news! After a lot of hard work and hundreds of cups of coffee we’re proud to announce that the new documentation of the Zabbix API is complete.  The improved API documentation provides both a high level overview of the available methods and in-depth descriptions of each method separately.

Value mapping is a neat, little feature in Zabbix that allows to see what a numeric code actually means. Well, what did that mean? For example, a UPS device might return “2”, which means “all is OK”, and “3”, which means “battery low”. There will be many different devices with different numeric codes, so remembering […]

We’ve recently published the documentation for some of the APIs that have been introduced in 2.0 but had not been covered in the manual at all. If you are a Zabbix expert, you’re probably already aware of their existence, but if you don’t know your way around the source code, you might have missed them. Anyway, […]

Having explored two other improvements to the built-in web monitoring – ability to template it and change retry count – let’s take a look at another one. Until Zabbix 2.2, it was not possible to set HTTP proxy for web monitoring… well, that’s not entirely true – with a hack one could set HTTP proxy for […]

“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 […]