In this chapter, you learned some fundamental concepts about high availability and service clustering. You also learned how to apply them to the Zabbix server architecture using the open source Pacemaker service manager suite and filesystem replication with DRBD. We also taught you the value of keeping things light and simple by choosing as few nodes as possible while maintaining a robust, redundant architecture. This completes the first part of the book that was focused on choosing the optimal Zabbix solution for an environment of any size. By choosing the right hardware, supporting software (refer to the Distributed monitoring section in Chapter 1, Deploying Zabbix), and high availability for the most sensitive components, you should now have Zabbix installed that is perfectly tailored to your needs and environment.

In the rest of the book, we will focus on using this setup to actually monitor your network and servers and make use of the data collected beyond simple alerts. The...