“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

Read more

API versioning

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.

Read more

The New API Docs

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.

Read more

Putting dots on JMX monitoring

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
Read more

Performance improvements in 2.0

The performance of Zabbix is being constantly improved, and there were significant performance improvements back in 1.8. Then pretty much every Zabbix 1.8 series release added some more benefits, reduced database access and so on. With the 2.0 release there are more performance benefits expected, but there’s so little time to gather some information… luckily, some users do provide us with empirical evidence 🙂

Read more