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.
Introduction
When monitoring Windows servers and services it would be really handy to have a check to see if all the services that are registered with the system to automatically start up during boot, are also started.
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. 🙂
On October 31st we introduced to our truly beloved Facebook followers an autumn contest, called “Zabbix Explorer”. During one month, until November 28th, the most enthusiastic, nimble, persistent and passionate Zabbix fans were competing with each other in order to win the title of ”Zabbix Explorer 2012”! 🙂
The 2.0.4 release contains a lot of improvements so one tiny change may have passed unnoticed: the version of the API has been bumped to 2.0.4 as well. Indeed, that’s one small change in the code, but a huge decision for the Zabbix developers team. The API version has remained on 1.4 since the release of 2.0, but finally we’ve developed a versioning that will suite our needs.
As announced two months ago, translation/string freeze is obeyed now. Zabbix 2.0 branch enters freeze now in preparation for 2.0.4 release.
For 2.0.3 our awesome translators managed to get 6 translations to 100%. How will it go for 2.0.4?
The Zabbix API is a great tool, which allows you to extend and tailor Zabbix to your specific needs. Yet using it still poses a challenge for many developers, because a lot of it is still undocumented. To solve this problem and make the API more open to third party developers we’ve decided to completely rewrite the documentation. Yes, everything. From scratch.
Introduction
JMX monitoring with Zabbix is easy using Zabbix Java gateway. Let’s say you have a JMX-enabled Java application running on some host. You start the Java gateway, configure Zabbix server to use that, add that host in Zabbix frontend, set up a JMX interface and create a JMX agent item (described here). A JMX item key name is (surprise-surprise!) jmx and it needs 2 parameters that describe a monitored entity:
- an MBean object name
- an MBean attribute name
Zabbix is translated in multiple languages, 21 in total. Some are in better shape, some in worse, but the 2.0.3 release marks something fairly unique – 6 languages have 100% coverage.