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

Rihards Olups

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.

ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide. Sculpt machines, environments, and creatures for your game development projects

Manuel Scherer

ZBrush is a fantastic tool for creating models for use in computer games. Using a wide range of powerful tools you can create models for vehicles, props, environments, and characters.This book makes creating game art in ZBrush fast and easy. It covers everything you need to create models of all kinds for your game projects, even if you've never used ZBrush before.Built around four complete ZBrush projects, the book gives you everything you need to sculpt props, vehicles, and creatures in ZBrush. You'll start by creating a spooky tree model, mastering the sculpting, texturing, and decoration skills that are essential for all ZBrush topics. Next you'll move to man-made objects with a sci-fi drone. Next you'll see how to sculpt monsters and other creatures, deal with cloth and other soft materials, and prepare the model to become an animated, controllable character in a game. The final project returns to machines, building a complete, detailed spaceship for use in your sci-fi games.

Zenoss Core 3.x Network and System Monitoring. A step-by-step guide to configuring, using, and adapting this free Open Source network monitoring system

Michael Badger

For system administrators, network engineers, and security analysts, it is essential to keep a track of network traffic.Zenoss Core is an enterprise-level systems and network monitoring solution that can be as complex as you need it to be. And while just about anyone can install it, turn it on, and monitor something, Zenoss Core has a complicated interface packed with features. The interface has been drastically improved over version 2, but it's still not the type of software you can use intuitively – in other words, a bit of guidance is in order.The role of this book is to serve as your Zenoss Core tour guide and save you hours, days, maybe weeks of time.This book will show you how to work with Zenoss and effectively adapt Zenoss for System and Network monitoring. Starting with the Zenoss basics, it requires no existing knowledge of systems management, and whether or not you can recite MIB trees and OIDs from memory is irrelevant. Advanced users will be able to identify ways in which they can customize the system to do more, while less advanced users will appreciate the ease of use Zenoss provides. The book contains step-by-step examples to demonstrate Zenoss Core's capabilities. The best approach to using this book is to sit down with Zenoss and apply the examples found in these pages to your system.The book covers the monitoring basics: adding devices, monitoring for availability and performance, processing events, and reviewing reports. It also dives into more advanced customizations, such as custom device reports, external event handling (for example, syslog server, zensendevent, and Windows Event Logs), custom monitoring templates using SNMP data sources, along with Nagios, and Cacti plugins. An example of a Nagios-style plugin is included and the book shows you where to get an example of a Cacti-compatible plugin for use as a command data source in monitoring templates. In Zenoss Core, ZenPacks are modules that add monitoring functionality. Using the Nagios plugin example, you will learn how to create, package, and distribute a ZenPack. You also learn how to explore Zenoss Core's data model using zendmd so that you can more effectively write event transformations and custom device reports.