Technical

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

…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?

In the past, quite often Zabbix users have been puzzled regarding some server tuning parameters – for example, how many pollers do they need? It was usually determined based on experience, testing and a bit of guesstimating. No more fuzzy attempts – get hard facts with Zabbix 1.8.5. UPDATED 2011.11.02: new downloadable template version v2 […]

There are many browsers in the world. Some better, some worse, some unusable. But some are just legendary. Probably no other browser version has ever been written and spoken about as much as one some of Zabbix users might have also heard about.

With all the snow outside, Zabbix developers have been busy indoors, working on neat features for Zabbix 2.0. While many of those are low level and don’t result in visually pleasing screenshots, just today a significant change was merged to cutting edge development branch – trunk.

The development of a monitoring solution, now called Zabbix, started way back in 1999. From the functional perspective, Zabbix is much more capable now than it was 11 years ago. However, is it possible that some of this functionality is still backed by code from those ancient times? How did the source code change over […]

Zabbix has built-in web monitoring, which provides scenario support – user workflow emulation on the webpage. There are also some neat predefined graphs on the scenario level. Dedicated Zabbix translator zalex_ua has shared some of these predefined graphs… from scenario with 20 steps.