Zabbix 2.2 features, part 6 – Returning values from webpages

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.

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 5 – Better value mapping

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.

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Newly documented APIs

We’ve recently published the documentation for some of the APIs that have been introduced in 2.0 but had not been covered in the manual at all. If you are a Zabbix expert, you’re probably already aware of their existence, but if you don’t know your way around the source code, you might have missed them. Anyway, you can now familiarize yourself with six useful APIs for maintaining your Zabbix configuration.

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Zabbix 2.2 features, part 4 – HTTP proxy for web monitoring

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.

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“Why on earth was I not notified?!”

“Why on earth was I not notified?!” — ever heard that question from a fellow worker? Setting up notifications can be a challenge — and not only for beginners. Normally, debugging such cases is cumbersome, complex and requires a good understanding of how Zabbix works. Were you ever asked for a list of people who would be notified on some event? It’s hard to tell, until the event actually happens. Or at least it used to:

The Action Simulator tries to relieve you from these problems and make you and your co-workers happy again.

Update: Presenting the Action simulator at the Zabbix Conference 2013

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