Book Image

Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy

By : Rihards Olups, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Andrea Dalle Vacche
Book Image

Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy

By: Rihards Olups, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Andrea Dalle Vacche

Overview of this book

Nowadays, monitoring systems play a crucial role in any IT environment. They are extensively used to not only measure your system’s performance, but also to forecast capacity issues. This is where Zabbix, one of the most popular monitoring solutions for networks and applications, comes into the picture. With an efficient monitoring system in place, you’ll be able to foresee when your infrastructure runs under capacity and react accordingly. Due to the critical role a monitoring system plays, it is fundamental to implement it in the best way from its initial setup. This avoids misleading, confusing, or, even worse, false alarms that can disrupt an efficient and healthy IT department. This course is for administrators who are looking for an end-to-end monitoring solution. It will get you accustomed with the powerful monitoring solution, starting with installation and explaining the fundamentals of Zabbix. Moving on, we explore the complex functionalities of Zabbix in the form of enticing recipes. These recipes will help you to gain control of your infrastructure. You will be able to organize your data in the form of graphs and charts along with building intelligent triggers for monitoring your network proactively. Toward the end, you will gain expertise in monitoring your networks and applications using Zabbix. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: Zabbix Network Monitoring-Second Edition Zabbix Cookbook Mastering Zabbix-Second Edition
Table of Contents (51 chapters)
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy
Credits
Preface
6
Detecting Problems with Triggers
7
Acting upon Monitored Conditions
Bibliography
Index

Chapter 4. Collecting Data

Now that you have a Zabbix installation that is properly sized for your environment, you will want to actually start monitoring it. While it's quite easy to identify which hosts and appliances, physical or otherwise, you may want to monitor, it may not be immediately clear what actual measurements you should take on them. The metrics that you can define on a host are called items, and this chapter will discuss their key features and characteristics. The first part will be more theoretical and will focus on the following:

  • Items as metrics, not for status checks

  • Data flow and directionality for items

  • Trapper items as a means to control the data flow

We will then move to a more practical and specific approach and will discuss how to configure items to gather data from the following data sources:

  • Databases and ODBC sources

  • Java applications, the JMX console, and SNMP agents

  • SSH monitoring

  • IMPI items

  • Web page monitoring

  • Aggregated and calculated items