Technical

Zabbix 2.4 is the upcoming major Zabbix version. While initially scheduled to be released in May 2014, it will be slightly delayed – Zabbix team is working hard, but there’s still a lot they would like to include in this release. While the new version is being baked, we can already start looking at the […]

Zabbix virtual appliance has been available for quite a long time now. It includes Zabbix server, agent and frontend, and everything is working out of the box. So far it has always been available in 32bit mode, to make it run on as wide range of platforms as possible. With the new Zabbix 2.0.8 release, […]

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 […]

Until Zabbix 2.0.7 proxies used a simple algorithm for their configuration synchronization – overwriting the old configuration with a new one. Even unchanged records were updated. It produced a lot of SQL updates even when there were no changes in configuration. It worked good enough until one user wanted to synchronize a heavy loaded proxy […]

One of the questions for those of us that use Zabbix on a large scale is “Just how much data can Zabbix ingest before it blows up spectacularly?” Some of the work I’ve been doing lately revolves around that question. I have an extremely large environment (around 32000+ devices) that could potentially be monitored entirely […]

Zabbix offers a lot of methods for data gathering, including SNMP. SNMP has been a popular protocol for many years and probably will stay that way – it’s used on routers, switches, UPS devices, storage arrays and lots of other devices.  Zabbix 2.2 will improve the existing SNMP support in several ways.

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 […]

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 […]

Zabbix comes with an impressive list of supported metrics for virtually all platforms. It covers the monitoring of performance and availability of OS including CPU, memory, network, processes, files, kernel parameters and more. Zabbix also performs agent-less checks for well-known services such as FTP, SSH, IMAP, POP3, HTTP, TCP, etc.

The Monitoring -> Latest data page in the Zabbix frontend allows to see values for items. Items are grouped by application (if assigned), and they can be expanded and collapsed. Previously, any such operation would result in a full page reload. 2.2 will make this operation happen without a page reload.

In several previous articles in the Zabbix 2.2 series we already discussed several improvements for web monitoring – the ability to template it, customise the amount of retries and the ability to specify an HTTP proxy on the scenario level. There’s more – in 2.2 it will also be possible to parse content from a […]

In the previous article in 2.2 series we explored a new ability to extract values from a webpage. This was not the only feature that was extended this way – several other items gained similar functionality – notably, file content parsing and logfile parsing. The latter has been a popular feature request and should be good […]