Exciting news! After a lot of hard work and hundreds of cups of coffee we’re proud to announce that the new documentation of the Zabbix API is complete. The improved API documentation provides both a high level overview of the available methods and in-depth descriptions of each method separately.
Zabbix Conference 2013 is coming. And for the third time it will happen at the hometown of Zabbix – Riga, Latvia.
Zabbix Conference 2013 location has been decided upon, and we are pleased to let you know that it’s Riga,…
We’ve had two awesome events already – Zabbix Conference 2011 and Zabbix Conference 2012. They both were held in…
Value mapping is a neat, little feature in Zabbix that allows to see what a numeric code actually means. Well, what did that mean? For example, a UPS device might return “2”, which means “all is OK”, and “3”, which means “battery low”. There will be many different devices with different numeric codes, so remembering what they all mean is nearly impossible. Value mapping will show a human readable description, but the raw value will still follow in the parentheses – for example, Normal (2).
Until Zabbix 2.2, this was only supported for integers. Zabbix 2.2 will allow to configure value mapping also for decimal and string values.
Having explored two other improvements to the built-in web monitoring – ability to template it and change retry count – let’s take a look at another one. Until Zabbix 2.2, it was not possible to set HTTP proxy for web monitoring… well, that’s not entirely true – with a hack one could set HTTP proxy for the whole Zabbix server (or, since Zabbix 2.0, Zabbix proxy), but there was no way to set it per web scenario. Zabbix 2.2 will provide such a feature.
When we started following the string freeze principle for Zabbix 2.0.3 release, the goal was to give translators some time period before each release, thus increasing the chances of a translation being completely finished. That did help, and 2.0.3 came out with 6 translations at 100%. Now the translation freeze for Zabbix 2.0.5 starts.
Let’s continue our series about the improvements that are coming in Zabbix 2.2. We already examined one web monitoring improvement – ability to template it. But there’s more – in 2.2 you will be able to specify how many times a web scenario should be retried.
Continuing with the series on upcoming Zabbix 2.2, the second feature we will look at will be related to the built-in web monitoring that has been available in Zabbix for quite some time already. One problem some users faced – there was no way to use the extensive Zabbix templating system for web monitoring. This was not an issue if all we wanted to monitor were standard websites, but as soon as there would be a large amount of identical webservers, one would have to either do a lot of manual configuration or some scripting via the Zabbix API. Zabbix 2.2 will greatly simplify this by providing templatable web monitoring.
Zabbix currently is at version 2.0, and this version took quite a long time to get out – almost 2 and a half years. Of course, all that wait was not in vain – Zabbix 2.0 provided a huge amount of new features. It did mean that you and me had to wait for quite some time before benefiting from those features, though, so there will be an effort to make Zabbix 2.2 happen sooner. Let’s start to look at the improvements Zabbix 2.2 will provide – and let’s start with the one that everybody upgrading will notice – automated database schema upgrades.
EPEL finally offers Zabbix 2.0 packages. These packages are for you, if you are running RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux or any other Red Hat derivative. EPEL aims to provide best quality packages, that follow the same rules and conventions as Red Hat packages and therefore integrate smoothly.
To be known, accepted and demanded in the different corners of the world is of course a big honor and the pride of every developing and dynamic company. However, to become recognized by the company’s home country and to be named “the best”, that’s what makes you really proud of who you are and what you are doing, as we all know – the most honest critique and valuation of the things you do comes from the closest people. 🙂