After having a brimming first day and an even more exciting night, the participants gathered their strength for another round of insightful talks, case studies and intriguing ideas, shared on the Zabbix conference.
Reporting Large Environment Zabbix Database
Alain Ganuchaud took the stage to inspire viewers explore the key strategies of Zabbix Database Reporting in a large environment with more than 14 000 hosts and a million of items. He covered usage of API vs SQL queries and passing the data to the open source Jasper reporting engine.
Employing Zabbix to monitor OpenWrt (Beesip) devices with Uciprov
Lukas Macura took over with a talk about Beesip – a VoIP specialized OpenWRT-based distribution using Zabbix, utilizing auto-discovery and auto-registration, showing possibilities of provisioning and auto inventory, discovering wireless devices and monitoring neighboring channels and strength, once more proving the versatility of Zabbix.
How to Debug Common Agent Issues
All the attendees who had ever had any need to troubleshoot Zabbix agent daemon listened carefully to Volker Fröhlich covering many common and uncommon problems, such as unsupported items, data missing, passive or active items, user-parameters and more. Volker explained many typical “gotchas” in detail and suggested lots of approaches and tools for debugging. Tracing execution, capturing network traffic or increasing debug level – all listeners now will be able to debug monitoring issues much more efficiently.
Event-driven Service Discovery
Eugene Istomin took a glimpse in the future of IT infrastructure and enterprise monitoring system implementation, involving TOGAF model, careful analysis, design and planning. He demonstrated the usage of ArchiMate for the environment modelling, and the struggle between having a clear view or rich information. It’s important that all involved parties work together, so that the general design furthers a common long-term goal.
Hardening Zabbix
Patrik Uytterhoeven, author of Zabbix Cookbook, in his talk explained why we need SELinux to keep Zabbix secure, pointing out common pitfalls and solutions to issues, and how to find out what features did not work because of it and how to solve those problems.
Using Logstash with Zabbix
Aaron Mildenstein introduced log monitoring tool Logstash, highlighting the basic features and demonstrating sending data to Zabbix using a Logstash output support – “a potential gold mine for Zabbix trending and alerting of all kinds” and using monitoring Zabbix IRC channel, as a fun example.
Zabbix 3.0: Design/Excited for new features?
Showing off the shiny new front-end for Zabbix 3.0, our designer Pavel Amosov explained the reasoning behind the changes and specific usability improvements, also providing insights in plans for a better UI. Right after that, Zabbix team member Rihards Olups teased the audience with the improvements for Zabbix 3.0, including trigger prototype dependencies, SMTP authentication, trend prediction and XML import/export for value maps generating a lot of interest questions from the audience.
5 Minutes of Inspiration!
This year we sparked our usual agenda with 5 minute Lightning talks challenging speakers to express their thoughts in a nutshell. We’re definitely going to keep this tradition!
- Florian Koch – Monitoring CoreOS with Zabbix
- Andres Toomsalu – Infrastructure Performance Monitoring
- Gabriele Armao – Zabbix All Around You
- Kazuhiko Inaba – Ahiruyaki
- Wolfgang Alper – Zabbix Reporter
- Dimitri Bellini – Aggregate Zabbix
Wrapping up Zabbix Conference 2015
In the last hour of the agenda all the participants asked direct questions to our team members during a brisk Q&A session. Questions spanned technical detail of some implementation, decisions to use specific frameworks to plans about features, design and general outlook.
As always Alexei Vladishev, founder of Zabbix, concluded the conference by reminding all of us to keep thriving for new heights and breed new ideas until the next year.
A Taste of History at Latvian Open-Air Museum
Straight from the venue hall, we hopped aboard buses for a short trip to the Open Air Museum on the outskirts of Riga, where in a pleasant late-summer weather we explored 300 year old churches, historic homesteads, tar kiln and other historic landmarks, glancing into the past of Latvia. Guided by master craftsmen participants created coins, to bring them luck on their travels home.