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.
“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
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.
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.
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:
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?
