Book Image

Mastering Zabbix

By : Andrea Dalle Vacche, Stefano Kewan Lee
Book Image

Mastering Zabbix

By: Andrea Dalle Vacche, Stefano Kewan Lee

Overview of this book

<p>Monitoring systems are a crucial part of any IT environment. They can be extremely useful not only to identify specific problems, but also to measure your system’s performance and find the best way to improve it. However, they can be misleading and confusing if not correctly configured and managed. False alarms and missing data can undermine a monitoring system's contribution to a healthy IT department. Zabbix 2.2 allows you to customize and implement ideas by extending, adding, or customizing functionality, giving an added value to that technology.</p> <p>This comprehensive guide will help you to make both strategic and practical decisions about the Zabbix monitoring system, so that it will fit your environment and monitoring needs like a glove. From choosing the correct size and configurationto what you should actually monitor, including exporting and integrating your data with other systems, this book will leave you with no doubts about the crucial role of a well configured monitoring system.</p> <p>Introducing you to methods to configure and choose between high availability and distributed Zabbix architectures for your largeenvironment, this guide will proceed to show you how to gather monitoring data, visualize, and act on it. Next, the guide explores how you can extend Zabbix and connect it to trouble ticketing systems or data mining solutions. You will also learn how to choose the ideal database backend, monitor appliances that only talk SNMP and application servers that talk JMX, and organize your charts and maps in screens that can be visualized on big screens. It shows you how to leverage Zabbix's discovery capabilities to track your ever changing environment and build complex, intelligent alarms that won't distract you with trivial problems. Finally, you will learn to expand Zabbix's capabilities through its scripting facilities, protocol and powerful API.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Zabbix
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Sending data using zabbix_sender


Until here, you have seen how to implement external checks on both the server and agent side, moving the workload from the monitoring host to the monitored host. You can understand how both methods in the case of heavy and extensive monitoring are not the best approach, since we are thinking of placing Zabbix in a large environment. Most probably, it is better to have a server dedicated to all our checks and use those two functionalities for all the checks that are not widely run.

Zabbix provides utility designed to send data to the server. This utility is zabbix_sender, and with it, you can send item data to your server, using the items of a Zabbix trapper type.

To test the zabbix_sender utility, you simply add a Zabbix trapper item to an existing host and run the command:

zabbix_sender -z <zabbixserver> -s <yourhostname> -k <item_key> -o <value>

You will get a response like the following:

Info from server: "Processed 1 Failed 0 Total...