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

Understanding high availability


High availability is an architectural design approach and associate service implementation that is used to guarantee the reliability of a service. Availability is directly associated to the uptime and usability of a service. This means that the downtime should be reduced to achieve an agreement on that service.

We can distinguish between two kinds of downtime:

  • Scheduled or planned downtime

  • Unscheduled or unexpected downtime

To distinguish between the scheduled downtime, we can include:

  • System patching

  • Hardware expansion or hardware replacement

  • Software maintenance

  • All that is normally a planned maintenance task

Unfortunately, all these downtimes will interrupt your service, but you have to agree that they can be planned into a maintenance window agreed.

The unexpected downtime normally arises from a failure, and it can be caused by one of the following reasons:

  • Hardware failure

  • Software failure

  • Physical events

Unscheduled downtimes also include the power outage and over...