E-book details

Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring. Monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance effectively and efficiently

Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring. Monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance effectively and efficiently

Rihards Olups

Ebook
Imagine you're celebrating the start of the weekend with Friday-night drinks with a few friends. And then suddenly your phone rings -- one of the servers you administer has gone down, and it needs to be back up before tomorrow morning. So you drag yourself back to the office, only to discover that some log files have been growing more than usual over the past few weeks and have filled up the hard drive. While the scenario above is very simplistic, something similar has happened to most IT workers at one or another point in their careers. To avoid such situations this book will teach you to monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance using Zabbix- an open source system monitoring and reporting solution.The versatility of Zabbix allows monitoring virtually anything, but getting started with the new concepts can take some time. This book will take you through the most common tasks in a hands-on, step by step manner.Zabbix is a very flexible IT monitoring suite, but not every part of it is immediately clear to new users. Following the instructions in this book should allow you to set up monitoring of various metrics on various devices, including Linux and Windows machines, SNMP devices, IPMI enabled server,s and other network attached equipment. You will learn to define conditions – such a temperature being too high or service being down – and act upon them by notifying user by email, SMS, or even restarting service. You will learn to visualize the gathered data with graphs and the various tips and tricks that are provided will help to use Zabbix more efficiently and avoid common pitfalls.This book covers setting up Zabbix from the scratch and gradually introduces basic components of Zabbix, moving to more advanced topics later. Book's scope is based on the author's experience of working with Zabbix for many years, as well as on the questions users have asked on the Zabbix IRC channel and forums.
  • Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring
    • Table of Contents
    • Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring
    • Credits
    • About the Author
    • About the Reviewers
    • Preface
      • What this book covers
      • Who this book is for
      • Conventions
      • Reader feedback
      • Customer support
        • Errata
        • Piracy
        • Questions
    • 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
      • First steps in monitoring
      • Zabbix features and architecture
      • Installation
        • Server and agent
          • Software requirements
          • Hardware requirements
      • Getting the source
        • Compilation
        • Initial configuration
        • Creating and populating the database
          • Starting up
      • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
      • Slackware
        • Verifying the services state
      • The Web frontend
        • Prerequisites and setting up the environment
        • Installation of the web frontend
          • Step 1 Welcome
          • Step 2 Licence
          • Step 3 PHP prerequisites
          • Step 4 Database access.
          • Step 5 Zabbix server details
          • Step 6 Summary
          • Step 7 Writing the configuration file
          • Step 8 Configuration file in place
          • Step 9 Finishing the wizard
          • Step 10 Logging in
      • Summary
    • 2. Getting Your First Notification
      • Exploring the frontend
      • Monitoring quickstart
        • Creating a host
        • Creating an item
        • Introducing simple graphs
        • Creating triggers
        • Configuring e-mail parameters
        • Creating an action
      • Information flow in Zabbix
      • Let's create some load
      • Basic item configuration
        • Monitoring categories
          • Availability
          • Performance
          • Security
          • Management
          • Efficiency
        • Item types
        • How items can be monitored
      • Summary
    • 3. Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols
      • Using Zabbix agent
        • Passive items
          • Cloning items
        • Active items
        • Supported items
      • Simple checks
        • Setting up ICMP checks
      • Tying it all together
        • Positional parameters for item descriptions
        • Using mass update
        • Value mapping
        • Copying items
      • Summary
    • 4. Monitoring SNMP and IPMI Devices
      • Simple Network Management Protocol
        • Using Net-SNMP
          • Using SNMPv3 with Net-SNMP
        • Adding new MIBs
        • Working with SNMP items in Zabbix
          • Translating SNMP OIDs
          • Dynamic indexes
          • Receiving SNMP traps
          • Trap handling schemes
            • Custom mapping
            • Database lookups
            • SNMP Trap Translator
      • Intelligent Platform Management Interface
        • Dell Remote Access Controller
        • Preparing Zabbix for IPMI querying
        • Configuring DRAC IPMI access
        • Setting up IPMI items
          • Card attached to one of the already monitored hosts
          • Card attached to a different host
          • Creating IPMI item
      • Summary
    • 5. Managing Hosts, Users, and Permissions
      • Host and host groups
      • Users, user groups, and permissions
        • Authentication methods
        • Creating a user
        • Creating user groups
      • Summary
    • 6. Acting Upon Monitored Conditions
      • Triggers
        • Trigger dependencies
        • Constructing trigger expressions
          • Triggers that time out
          • Human-readable constants
        • Event details
        • Event generation and hysteresis
      • Actions
        • Limiting conditions when actions are sent
          • Additional action conditions
          • Dependencies and actions
          • Per media limits
        • Sending out notifications
          • Using macros
        • Escalating things
        • Integration with issue management systems
          • Bugzilla
          • CA Unicenter Service Desk
        • Using scripts as media
        • Remote commands
      • Summary
    • 7. Simplifying Complex Configuration with Templates
      • Identifying template candidates
      • Creating a template
      • Linking templates to hosts
        • Changing configuration in template
        • Macro usage
      • Using multiple templates
        • Unlinking templates from hosts
      • Nested templates
      • Summary
    • 8. Visualizing the Data
      • Visualize what?
      • Single elements
        • Graphs
          • Simple graphs
          • Custom graphs
            • Working time and trigger line
            • Two y-axis
            • Sort order
            • Custom y-axis scale
            • Stacked graphs
            • Pie graphs
        • Maps
          • Creating a map
          • Linking map elements
          • Further map customization
            • Macros in labels
            • Link labels
            • Map element highlighting
            • Global map options
            • Available map elements
      • Compound elements
        • Screens
          • Dynamic screens
        • Slide shows
      • Showing data on a big display
        • Challenges
          • Non-interactive display
          • Information overload
          • Displaying a specific section automatically
          • Recent change flashing
      • Summary
    • 9. Creating Reports
      • Simple reports
        • Status of Zabbix
        • Availability report
        • Most busy triggers top 100
      • Bar reports
        • Distribution of values for multiple periods
        • Distribution of values for multiple items
        • Comparing values for multiple periods
      • Summary
    • 10. Advanced Item Monitoring
      • Aggregate items
      • External checks
      • User parameters
        • Just getting it to work
        • Querying data that Zabbix agent does not support
        • Flexible user parameters
        • Level of the details monitored
        • Environment trap
        • Things to remember about user parameters
          • Wrapper scripts
      • Other methods to gather data
        • Sending in the data
        • Using custom agents
      • Summary
    • 11. Monitoring Windows and Web Pages
      • Monitoring web pages
        • Creating web monitoring scenario
      • Windows-specific monitoring
        • Installing Zabbix agent for Windows
        • Querying performance counters
          • Using numeric references to performance counters
          • Using aliases for performance counters
        • Monitoring Windows services
          • Checking whether an automatic service has stopped
      • Summary
    • 12. Using Proxies to Monitor Remote Locations
      • When proxies are useful
      • Setting up the proxy
      • Monitoring a host through a proxy
      • Proxy benefits
      • Proxy reliability
      • Tweaking proxy configuration
      • Summary
    • 13. Working Closely with Data
      • Getting raw data
        • Extracting from the frontend
        • Querying the database
          • Using data in a remote site
      • Diving further in the database
        • Managing users
        • Converting a host to a template
        • Changing existing data
          • Finding out "when"
          • "When" in computer language
          • Finding out what
          • Performing the change
      • Using XML import/export for configuration
        • Exporting initial configuration
        • Modifying configuration
          • XML export format
          • Script around the export
        • Importing modified configuration
      • Summary
    • 14. Upgrading Zabbix
      • General policy
        • Zabbix versions
        • Version upgrades
      • Upgrading Zabbix
        • Change level upgrade
          • Adding the indexes
          • Replacing frontend files
        • Minor or major level upgrades
          • Patching the database
            • Gathering the data during the upgrade
          • Frontend configuration file
      • Compatibility
      • Summary
    • 15. Taking Care of Zabbix
      • Internal items
      • Performance considerations
        • Reducing the query count
        • Increasing write performance
      • Who did that?
      • Real men make no backups
        • Backing up the database
        • Restoring from backup
        • Separating configuration and data backups
      • Summary
    • A. Troubleshooting
      • Installation
        • Compilation
        • Frontend
        • Starting services
      • Frontend
        • Locked out of the frontend
      • Problems with monitoring
        • General monitoring
        • Monitoring with Zabbix agent
          • User parameters
        • Problems with SNMP devices
        • Problems with IPMI monitoring
        • Problems with ICMP checks
        • General issues
      • Triggers
      • Actions
    • B. Being Part of the Community
      • Community and support
        • Using the Zabbix forum
        • Editing the wiki
        • Chatting on IRC
        • Filing issues on the tracker
      • Following the development
        • Getting the source
          • Daily snapshots
          • Accessing the version control system
            • Looking at the changesets
      • Commercial support options
      • Summary
    • Index
  • Title: Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring. Monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance effectively and efficiently
  • Author: Rihards Olups
  • Original title: Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring. Monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance effectively and efficiently
  • ISBN: 9781847197696, 9781847197696
  • Date of issue: 2010-03-29
  • Format: Ebook
  • Item ID: e_3cgq
  • Publisher: Packt Publishing