Book Image

Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring

By : Rihards Olups
Book Image

Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring

By: Rihards Olups

Overview of this book

Imagine you're celebrating the start of the weekend with Friday-night drinks with a few friends. And then suddenly your phone rings -- one of the servers you administer has gone down, and it needs to be back up before tomorrow morning. So you drag yourself back to the office, only to discover that some log files have been growing more than usual over the past few weeks and have filled up the hard drive. While the scenario above is very simplistic, something similar has happened to most IT workers at one or another point in their careers. To avoid such situations this book will teach you to monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance using Zabbix- an open source system monitoring and reporting solution.The versatility of Zabbix allows monitoring virtually anything, but getting started with the new concepts can take some time. This book will take you through the most common tasks in a hands-on, step by step manner.Zabbix is a very flexible IT monitoring suite, but not every part of it is immediately clear to new users. Following the instructions in this book should allow you to set up monitoring of various metrics on various devices, including Linux and Windows machines, SNMP devices, IPMI enabled server,s and other network attached equipment. You will learn to define conditions – such a temperature being too high or service being down – and act upon them by notifying user by email, SMS, or even restarting service. You will learn to visualize the gathered data with graphs and the various tips and tricks that are provided will help to use Zabbix more efficiently and avoid common pitfalls.This book covers setting up Zabbix from the scratch and gradually introduces basic components of Zabbix, moving to more advanced topics later. Book's scope is based on the author's experience of working with Zabbix for many years, as well as on the questions users have asked on the Zabbix IRC channel and forums.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
6
Acting Upon Monitored Conditions

Chapter 3. Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols

Now that we have explored the basics of information gathering and acting upon it in Zabbix, let's take a closer look at two simple and widely used methods for obtaining data - the already mentioned Zabbix agents, and so called simple checks; which include TCP connectivity and ICMP checks.

Using Zabbix agent

Previously, we installed the Zabbix agent on the same host and monitored a single item for it. It's now time to expand and see how inter-host connectivity works.

To continue, install the Zabbix agent on another host. Compiling an agent only is done in a similar way to how we compiled everything in the beginning, but instead of the full configure line, you just need a single flag this time:

$ ./configure --enable-agent

Configuration should complete successfully and the following summary lines are important:

Enable server: no
Enable proxy: no
Enable agent: yes

If the output you see matches the above output, continue by issuing...