With Zabbix Summit 2023 almost upon us, we’ve prepared a short and direct interview with Summit presenter Dr. Hiroshi Abe. Dr. Abe, a Research Engineer at the Toyota Motor Corporation, will share his thoughts about how Zabbix is the ideal solution when it comes to monitoring green power and distributed edge computing.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I have been working for the Toyota Motor Corporation as a Research Engineer since 2019. My current research topics are related to large-scale monitoring systems that target connected car communications, edge computing, and green IT.
How long have you been using Zabbix? What Zabbix tasks are you involved in every day at your company?
Although I am technically retired, since 2015 I have been a member of the Monitoring team of the Network Operation Center, which is part of the ShowNet building team for the “Interop Tokyo” show event in Japan. I have been working with Kodai Terashima, CEO of Zabbix Japan, to build a monitoring system using Zabbix to monitor the event network required for ShowNet. In my office, we use Zabbix to monitor network and server equipment as well as our R&D environment.
Can you give us a sneak peek at what we can expect to hear during your Zabbix Summit speech?
You might expect to hear something deeply related to cars, and it’s true that much of the data created by cars can be processed using edge computing before being transported to the cloud. However, edge computing for the optimal use of green power will be the main topic of my talk. I’ll discuss a distributed monitoring system that uses Zabbix and Zabbix Proxy as a monitoring system for edge environments and green power in multiple data centers.
What made you go with Zabbix as a monitoring solution for green power and edge computing?
Zabbix Proxy is an easy-to-use distributed monitoring solution. A distributed monitoring system is a must for us because there will be multiple edge computing locations all over Japan.
Are you deploying Zabbix using containers to monitor your DCs?
We used RedHat’s OpenShift to implement the edge computing and data synchronization mechanism. We were able to easily deploy Zabbix in OpenShift as a container using Operator, and the monitoring environment using Zabbix containers is implemented in multiple DCs.