It was interesting. It was fun. But what matters the most, Zabbix community members got back together in one place to share their experiences, ideas and thoughts about their beloved product – Zabbix Monitoring Solution!
Zabbix virtual appliance has been available for quite a long time now. It includes Zabbix server, agent and frontend,…
Until Zabbix 2.0.7 proxies used a simple algorithm for their configuration synchronization – overwriting the old configuration with a…
The Zabbix 2.0 translation team has done a great job, but there’s something else coming closer… no promises, but Zabbix 2.2 will come out one day 🙂
With lots of new features and improvements, translatable strings have changed significantly, too. Even for languages that are in great shape in 2.0, things don’t look that great in 2.2 – yet.
One of the questions for those of us that use Zabbix on a large scale is “Just how much data can Zabbix ingest before it blows up spectacularly?” Some of the work I’ve been doing lately revolves around that question. I have an extremely large environment (around 32000+ devices) that could potentially be monitored entirely by Zabbix in the future.
Zabbix offers a lot of methods for data gathering, including SNMP. SNMP has been a popular protocol for many years and probably will stay that way – it’s used on routers, switches, UPS devices, storage arrays and lots of other devices. Zabbix 2.2 will improve the existing SNMP support in several ways.
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 page and reuse it in further scenario steps.
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 news for many users.
And now for some more detail on changes for item keys vfs.file.regexp[], vfs.file.regmatch[], log[] and logrt[].
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 was no built-in way to do that, but it is coming for Zabbix 2.2.
So who cares about monitoring the environment?