Technical

This came as the first assignment for me, a new Zabbix employee – to fix a bug ZBX-3788 zabbix daemon processes hang on futex Sometimes terminating a Zabbix agent with “killall -15 zabbix_agentd” resulted in one hanging process and other processes in the <defunct> state. strace utility showed the process was hanging on futex: Process […]

Everything in the world of electronics gets smaller, while performance continues to grow. I know I should not compare those computers from 1960 with what we have now, but I still get amazed all the time. The thing about modern computers is that sometimes it is a waste of resources to see them using a small […]

So far, upgrading from one development 1.9 release or 2.0.0 release candidate to another was not officially supported. Only unofficial patches and only for MySQL were available. Starting  with 2.0.0rc3, all database upgrades for all supported databases will be fully supported. This should be great news for those who would like to do extended testing, […]

Zabbix agent currently supports only one server in active mode – the first host from the Server configuration parameter is used. While for most users that is enough, some installations require a more advanced approach with the agent being able to report to multiple servers in the active mode.

While it is possible to monitor various aspects of virtual environments with current versions of Zabbix, it does require some time to set it all up and isn’t as integrated as it could be. A more integrated experience for virtual environment monitoring is currently being considered for development. It might cover VMware, Xen, KVM (and […]

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 […]

Normally, Alexei is the one that directs Zabbix development: which bugs are meant to be fixed and which features are meant to be implemented. However, sometimes Alexei is too busy to pay enough attention to what developers are doing, and that is a chance to do some hacking. Here is one of them.

Zabbix is used to monitor many of the world’s biggest environments. But it also monitors its own (albeit small) environment. And this environment recently saw a shark attack.

The encoding, database and the dog Zabbix provides a network map feature, where images may represent triggers, hosts, host groups etc. They may show current status, problem count and lots of other data. There are some default images that may be used in the maps, and users may also upload their own. This uploading has […]

Zabbix daemons use various approaches to improve performance. One such measure, introduced in Zabbix 1.8, is configuration cache. It resulted in massive performance improvements (up to 10 times), mostly because of a significantly reduced database access (that we looked at in previous blog posts). This cache slightly changes how Zabbix operates, though, and can introduce […]

…in the configuration files, that is. For a long time, if you made a mistake in a configuration parameter’s name, Zabbix processes would not really tell you about that. This is finally changing with Zabbix 1.8.6.

One of the promises of Zabbix is an ability to monitor pretty much anything. That is possible using various extending capabilities on the Zabbix server, binary agent and elsewhere. Maybe we can monitor some aspects of Zabbix community using Zabbix itself?