Understanding website performance and Apache uptime should begin with external monitoring, i.e. Zabbix, which allows you to discover problems from a user’s perspective. Such problems involve:
With new preprocessing steps added to Zabbix in nearly every release, it became obvious that it’s impossible to predict every business case, so we had to come up with a universal solution. This, in turn, raised an important question – which embedded scripting language/engine to use.
Let’s continue to cover the innovations of Zabbix 3.4, shall we? This time, we’re going to talk about the use of macros in update intervals and other time periods.
Once upon a time somebody said: “Let there be light!”, and our first Z Meetup was born. We took some time off from the enterprise-level challenges and tried to figure out more crucial things like Chinese or Italian food? Pink or blue light? Cats or dogs? In the end it turned out to be Chinese, pink and cats. We like feeling at home, so we made ourselves comfortable next to the red carpet (you see, we love red things – carpets, apples and hats) and were ready.
Macros are variables that can resolve to a specific value depending on the context and location inside Zabbix. Effective use of macros allows to save time and make Zabbix configuration more transparent.
Let’s imagine you fancy a walk in a park. You look out of the window – it’s a lovely sunny day, the skies are clear, birds are flying high… So you dress up and head to the park. Halfway to the park the wind starts to blow, the sky becomes overcast.
Zabbix Conference 2015 was a great event with a very busy agenda, plenty of presentations, discussions and meetings. And hard work should always be rewarded! This year was no exception, so we threw in our Zabbix official party, which all attendees were invited to join.
Just because we’re partying, however, doesn’t mean we can’t do something special.
Zabbix frontend is translated in many languages. For some, the coverage is great – 2.0.7 has been 100% translated in 9 languages. For some other translations the coverage is not that great… In preparation for Zabbix 2.2, there is a plan to remove translations below some threshold.
Creating complex maps is a time-consuming job. Actually, even designing a rather small map of 25 elements can take you an hour. That’s time you rather want to spend on something useful or fun, unless you’ve got a fetish for repetitive work. All we need to automate this task, is a network/graph library like Networkx and the Zabbix API.
Some might recall that back in 2011 we dug into old logfiles and produced a 5 year graph of Zabbix user count in the #zabbix IRC channel. At the same time, monitoring at a higher rate – hourly – was set up, and data collection started. Now that it’s been 2 years since that graph, let’s take a look at the new graph, how the user count has changed in two years and how Zabbix copes with a 7 year graph.
Zabbix trigger expressions provide an incredibly flexible way of defining problem conditions. If you can express your problem using plain English or any other human language, there is a great chance it could be represented using triggers.
I’ve noticed that even experienced Zabbix users are not always aware of the true power of triggers. The article is about defining problems in a smart way so that all alerts generated by Zabbix will be about real issues. No flapping, no false alarms anymore. Interested?
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.
