For quite some time now Zabbix has been offering a virtual appliance for those who would like to try it out or have a simple deployment for a small environment. Among other virtualisation solutions, users also run it on VirtualBox. But, when using NAT in VirtualBox, the host of the virtual machine cannot connect to the appliance directly. Let’s explore how this can be solved.
The translation improvement initiative is progressing nicely. We had a large jump for French from 69% to 100% and…
As many already know, Zabbix is translated in many languages, better in some, worse in others. With all the improvements that have happened to the translation framework and processes, including moving to gettext and recent introduction of string freeze, it seems like a good time to set some goals. How about getting as many translations as possible to 100% for 2.0.3?
Zabbix is already translated in quite a lot of languages, but there could always be more, and the available ones could have better coverage. There are several ways how translators’ work can be made easier, and one step is the introduction of string freeze, starting with Zabbix 2.0.3.
Often host level maintenance is too much. Picture a machine running multiple services: While one service has a scheduled downtime, others continue their work and you want to be alarmed about them. Zabbix has no maintenance on trigger level at present, but you can work around it quite easily.
While there are people who have been very active in the Zabbix community, it might not be so easy to start participating, especially if you are not frequenting IRC, which is the main Zabbix community hub. Hopefully the Zabbix community platform – Zabbix.org – can help here.
Zabbix API starts to play significant role especially when it comes to integration of Zabbix with third-party software like configuration and incident management systems as well as for automation of routine tasks. It is incredibly difficult to manage monitoring of thousands of hosts without some automation in place.
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 🙂
Akademy, if you happen to not know about it, is a yearly KDE conference that’s followed by various workshops and other events. This year Akademy happened to be really close to the Zabbix home, Riga – just some 300 km away in Tallinn, capital of Estonia. We decided to find out whether Akademy was any good.
This came as the first assignment for me, a new Zabbix employee – to fix a bug ZBX-3788 zabbix daemon processes hang on futex
Sometimes terminating a Zabbix agent with “killall -15 zabbix_agentd” resulted in one hanging process and other processes in the <defunct> state. strace utility showed the process was hanging on futex:
Process 10468 attached - interrupt to quit futex(0xb783ca50, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL
Everything in the world of electronics gets smaller, while performance continues to grow. I know I should not compare those computers from 1960 with what we have now, but I still get amazed all the time.
The thing about modern computers is that sometimes it is a waste of resources to see them using a small fraction of their computing power to perform some very small task. It is like seeing a huge crane lifting a grocery paper bag. Of course, modern computers allow you to run many tasks simultaneously, sharing the power. You may use virtualization to run several logical machines on one device. But still sometimes there are cases when all you need is just a cheap, reliable, energy and space efficient device to do the work.
So when I heard that a company Observe IT from the UK, a potential partner of Zabbix, is willing to test-drive Raspberry Pi with Zabbix Proxy, I happily replied “Send it over here!”. It took more than 2 long weeks for British-Latvian post offices to deliver a very lightweight box to our office. While awaiting the package, we retweeted a message from Richard Gate about successfully installing Zabbix on Raspberry Pi. It made us jealous, but we were willing to see how it works ourselves.
So we started with a careful unpacking of the box.
83 in total of enthusiastic, smart and savvy nerds were fighting hard to get the first place in Zabbix Facebook quiz “Zabbix Nerd Spring 2012”. 6 sets of questions and 23 answer options have been evaluated, studied and passed, and finally on the 7th of July, 2012, Zabbix followers on Facebook, all quiz participants and our true fans have found out the two lucky winners of “Zabbix Nerd” quiz.