The heart and soul of a Zabbix Summit is the wide range of expert speakers who show up each year to share their experience, knowledge, and discoveries. Accordingly, we’re continuing our series of interviews with Summit 2024 speakers by having a chat with MariaDB Sales Engineer Anders Karlsson. He’ll grace our stage at Summit 2024 to talk about his 4 decades of work experience and share how he uses a variety of Zabbix features to monitor MariaDB clusters and MariaDB MaxScale.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and the journey that led you to MariaDB.
I have been working with databases nearly all of my professional life, which is more than 40 years by now. My first IT job was as a system administrator on a development system for Telco equipment running UNIX on a PDP/11 70. This was fun, and I got to use Unix very early (the early 1980’s) and I was also there at the start of the Internet (by emailing through UUCP to the US and then through what was then the Internet).
Following that, I joined another Telco company, which used a rather unknown database technology called Oracle (version 4.1.4). When this company moved their operations from Stockholm (where I lived) to Luxembourg, I decided to leave and look for other opportunities. I heard that Oracle was looking for people and I got a job there as a support engineer. At Oracle I soon got involved with lots of things beyond Tech Support – I was a trainer, a consultant, and eventually a sales engineer.
I left Oracle in the early 1990’s to join a small application development company as a developer, but this really wasn’t for me, so I soon left and joined Informix instead. I was at Informix until 1996 or so and then I worked for some other small companies around the end of the millennium. Next, I joined forces with a couple of old friends to develop a database solution. This wasn’t very successful, and I still needed a job.
I first ended up with TimesTen before they ran out of luck. After a year or so of freelancing, I was approached by an old friend from the Informix days who was now the sales manager for MySQL in Scandinavia. I joined MySQL in 2004 as a sales engineer and was there until Oracle took over. I then worked for a small Swedish startup for a couple of years, but I missed sales engineering, so when I got an offer to join MariaDB in 2012 I said yes.
How long have you been using Zabbix? What kind of Zabbix tasks do you get up to on a daily basis?
I have known about Zabbix and used it occasionally for a while, but while preparing for Zabbix Summit 2024 I have gotten to use it “in anger” a bit more. There are pros and cons to it, but in general I like it. It does have a lot of “Open Source” feel to it, but that is not really an issue for me.
Can you give us a few clues about what we can expect to hear during your Zabbix Summit presentation?
I will focus on monitoring MariaDB Clusters running Galera Cluster and the MariaDB MaxScale database proxy. Monitoring individual MariaDB servers is easy out of the box with Zabbix, but when you have a cluster you have to monitor certain cluster-wide attributes. MariaDB MaxScale keeps track of the state of the server in the cluster in detail and the cluster as whole, and I will show how to pull cluster-wide data from MaxScale using the MaxScale REST/JSON API and how to use that to build triggers and graphs in Zabbix. I will finish up by doing a demo of this with MariaDB MaxScale and a Galera Cluster.
What led you to the topic of Monitoring MariaDB Clusters and MariaDB MaxScale with Zabbix?
The main thing was that although there are community provided Zabbix templates for MariaDB MaxScale, and Galera can be monitored largely by the Zabbix agent, using these typically does not provide as much in terms of cluster-wide monitoring as I would like. It’s important to know how the reads and writes are distributed, what the state of the database cluster is, etc.
How do you see the role of Zabbix in MariaDB in the near future? Are you planning to use it for any other new tasks?
My next goal is to see if I can write a blog for MariaDB on Zabbix monitoring with some emphasis on MariaDB MaxScale.