Most probably, if you are reading this book, you have already used and installed Zabbix. Most likely on a small/medium environment, but now things have changed and your environment today is a large one with new challenges coming in regularly. Nowadays environments are rapidly growing or changing and it is a difficult task to be ready to support and provide a reliable monitoring solution.
Normally, an initial startup of a system, also a monitoring system, is done by following some tutorial or how-to and this is a common error. This kind of approach is valid for smaller environments, when the downtime is not critical, when there are no disaster recovery sites to handle, or, in few words, when things are easy.
Most likely these setups are not done looking forward to the possible new quantity of new items, triggers, and events that the server should elaborate. If you have already installed Zabbix and you need to plan and expand your monitoring solution, or if instead you need to plan and design the new monitoring infrastructure, this chapter will help you.
This chapter will also help you perform the difficult task of setting up/upgrading Zabbix in a large and very large environment. This chapter will cover every aspect of this task, starting with the definition of a large environment up to using Zabbix as a capacity planning resource. The chapter will introduce all the possible Zabbix solutions, doing a practical example with an installation ready to handle a large environment, going ahead with some possible improvements.
At the end of this chapter, you will understand how Zabbix works, which tables should be kept under special surveillance and you will know how to improve the housekeeping on a large environment that, with some years of trends to handle, is a really heavy task.
This chapter will cover the following points:
Knowing when you are in front of a large environment and defining when an environment can be considered a large environment
Setting up/upgrading Zabbix on a large and a very large environment
Installing Zabbix on a three tier setup and having a readymade solution to handle a large environment
Database sizing and finally knowing the total amount of space consumed by our data acquired
Knowing the database heavy tables and tasks
Improving housekeeping to reduce the RDBMS load and improving the efficiency of the whole system
Learning some fundamental concepts about capacity planning, bearing in mind that Zabbix is and can be a capacity-planning tool