In this chapter, we covered a large number of components. We started with defining what a large environment is. We also saw how the network setup can be designed and how it can evolve within your infrastructure. We saw the heaviest task on the server side (housekeeping) and how to avoid performance degradation due to this. We discussed MySQL partitioning in-depth. We also briefly discussed the differences between active and passive proxies; you will now be able to decide how to set them up and which one to choose once you know your network topology. Also, we saw how to acquire some critical metrics to monitor the Zabbix proxy connection and the amount of items that it still needs to send us.

As you can see, we covered a lot of arguments in just one chapter; we did this because we would like to use more space in the upcoming chapters. In the next chapter, we will explore the different appliances and protocols at layer 2 and layer 3 of the ISO/OSI stack. Also, you will see how to best extrapolate meaningful monitoring data from the collected measure for the protocol layers 2 and 3.