Book Image

Zabbix Network Monitoring - Second Edition

By : Rihards Olups, Rihards Olups, Rihards Olups
Book Image

Zabbix Network Monitoring - Second Edition

By: Rihards Olups, Rihards Olups, Rihards Olups

Overview of this book

This book is a perfect starting point for monitoring with Zabbix. Even if you have never used a monitoring solution before, this book will get you up and running quickly, before guiding you into more sophisticated operations with ease. You'll soon feel in complete control of your network, ready to meet any challenges you might face. Beginning with installation, you'll learn the basics of data collection before diving deeper to get to grips with native Zabbix agents and SNMP devices. You will also explore Zabbix's integrated functionality for monitoring Java application servers and VMware. Beyond this, Zabbix Network Monitoring also covers notifications, permission management, system maintenance, and troubleshooting - so you can be confident that every potential challenge and task is under your control. If you're working with larger environments, you'll also be able to find out more about distributed data collection using Zabbix proxies. Once you're confident and ready to put these concepts into practice, you'll find out how to optimize and improve performance. Troubleshooting network issues is vital for anyone working with Zabbix, so the book is also on hand to help you work through any technical snags and glitches you might face. Network monitoring doesn't have to be a chore - learn the tricks of the Zabbix trade and make sure you're network is performing for everyone who depends upon it.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
Zabbix Network Monitoring Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
6
Detecting Problems with Triggers
7
Acting upon Monitored Conditions
Index

Pre-shared key encryption


Let's start with a simple situation—a single new host for which the Zabbix server will accept PSK-encrypted incoming connections only for the ones we will send some values to using zabbix_sender. For that to work, both Zabbix server and zabbix_sender must be compiled with TLS support. The PSK configuration consists of a PSK identity and key. The identity is some string that is not considered to be secret—it is not encrypted during the communication; do not put sensitive information in the identity string. The key is a hex string.

Tip

Zabbix requires the key to be at least 32 characters (hexadecimal digits) long. The maximum in Zabbix is 512 characters, but it might depend on the specific version of the backend library you are using.

We could just type the key in manually, but a slightly easier method might be using the openssl command:

$ openssl rand -hex 64

This will generate a 512-bit key, which we will use in a moment. Navigate to Configuration | Hosts, click on...