It’s easy to miss critical messages when you get tons of them every day from various platforms. The out-of-the-box Zabbix monitoring and alerting functionality makes it possible to focus on the most important alerts. Learn the best practices on how to set and use Zabbix notifications.
Contents
I. Introduction (0:44)
II. How to make Zabbix alerts stand out (2:39)
1. Supported macros (5:33)
2. Out-of-the-box monitoring and alerting functionality (7:24)
3. Custom scripts (8:09)
III. Useful insight (11:06)
How to make Zabbix alerts stand out?
Zabbix messages are important as Zabbix notifies you if anything goes wrong or is going to go wrong. For a big team, it’s a good idea to decide how to send and to receive messages.
What happens if the message is unclear? Many people will try to figure out what’s going on, to log in to certain systems. Here, the most important thing is that people need to know what to do and what to check up when they receive the message, otherwise, they’ll waste a lot of time. That is the reason why messages should be addressed to the right people and contain the right information to prevent such a waste of time and speed up the process of remediation.
We can use scripts that can do it, but after you restart your interface for the second time, you’ll usually need a human to interfere.
Supported macros
To make messages better, you can use Zabbix macros to point at the right items, or groups, or hosts:notifications
-
- {TRIGGER URL}
- {TRIGGER VALUE}
- {TRIGGER SEVERITY}
You can also use macros to create recovery messages.
NOTE. For more information on the supported macros, please visit https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/appendix/macros/supported_by_location.
Out-of-the-box monitoring and alerting functionality
When something breaks down, you need to get notified when the problem has been fixed. But sometimes people just acknowledge recovery messages. In addition, there are too many ifs to make sure a message is read and acted on.
Zabbix has some out-of-the-box functionalities to ensure the message is read, which are extended in Zabbix 5.0., and which allows you to wake the right person up, such as webhooks, SMS ports, or scripts fired at the right time.
Zabbix out-of-the-box messaging and alerting functionalities
Custom scripts
You can also “wake up” the right person by applying custom scripts.
Wake-up formula
Useful insight
If you are new to Zabbix, and you need to decrease the amount of noise to a perfect level to receive only messages that you need, it may take some time to configure your alerts depending on your infrastructure. Anyway, you shouldn’t treat it as one big IT infrastructure, but try to make it work for each individual part that you are about to monitor.
If you monitor huge IT infrastructures of big companies, you’ll have a lot of databases, network equipment, web servers, etc. Even if you think that you have configured all the triggers properly, there’s always room for improvement. It’s a lot easier to treat all these parts separately and try to make alerting work for every part without interfering with the others.
In this case, you can properly monitor 20% of your infrastructure at a certain point, which is better than monitoring 100% without proper alarms.
See also: presentation video and slides.
