Here at the University of Hawaii at Manoa ITS department, we recently began using Zabbix. Before adopting Zabbix, we monitored our resources with a loosely integrated mix of several software components, including Cacti, MRTG, and uPortal. Having used this old system for quite a while, we have a considerable amount of data which is valuable for trending. So how do we switch to this great Zabbix system but retain all of our trending statistics? The instructions here describe how to convert data from either Cacti or MRTG and import it directly into Zabbix.
We are always curious to know where and how our software is used. Then add a natural desire for perpetual competition. Now you should understand why about 2 months ago we had asked all our newsletter readers to report us their Zabbix dashboard indicators.
We didn’t expect that so many of you will notice that small ad at the bottom of Christmas Eve’s newsletter inviting to take part in the competition 🙂 And so we were pleasantly surprised to receive so many replies.
Everything happens for the first time. This statement comes true with Zabbix rather often lately. Could be due to a rapid growth.
Normally, Alexei is the one that directs Zabbix development: which bugs are meant to be fixed and which features are meant to be implemented. However, sometimes Alexei is too busy to pay enough attention to what developers are doing, and that is a chance to do some hacking. Here is one of them.
Zabbix is used to monitor many of the world’s biggest environments. But it also monitors its own (albeit small) environment. And this environment recently saw a shark attack.
There was not much time for blog articles during the conference. Or after that. But from the on-site experience and feedback it seems that the very first Zabbix conference was just a bit short of amazing.
Zabbix conference starts tomorrow. But many guests have already arrived, and preparation works are happening. Here’s a small insight with images into various processes.
The encoding, database and the dog
Zabbix provides a network map feature, where images may represent triggers, hosts, host groups etc. They may show current status, problem count and lots of other data. There are some default images that may be used in the maps, and users may also upload their own. This uploading has been a problem in the past.
“Community activities changed everything” – The only Japanese engineer working in Latvian company.
This article is a translation from an interview with Kodai Terashima in @IT in Japan.
Zabbix daemons use various approaches to improve performance. One such measure, introduced in Zabbix 1.8, is configuration cache. It resulted in massive performance improvements (up to 10 times), mostly because of a significantly reduced database access (that we looked at in previous blog posts). This cache slightly changes how Zabbix operates, though, and can introduce some delays in configuration information processing. Zabbix 1.8.6 provides a new feature to help with configuration cache management.
…in the configuration files, that is. For a long time, if you made a mistake in a configuration parameter’s name, Zabbix processes would not really tell you about that. This is finally changing with Zabbix 1.8.6.
One of the promises of Zabbix is an ability to monitor pretty much anything. That is possible using various extending capabilities on the Zabbix server, binary agent and elsewhere. Maybe we can monitor some aspects of Zabbix community using Zabbix itself?