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

User parameters


The items we have looked at so far allowed us to query the built-in capabilities of a Zabbix agent, query SNMP devices, and reuse data on the Zabbix server. Every now and then, a need arises to monitor something that is not supported by Zabbix out of the box. The easiest and most popular method to extend Zabbix data collection is user parameters. They are commands that are run by the Zabbix agent and the result is returned as an item value. Let's try to set up some user parameters and see what things we should pay extra attention to.

Just getting it to work

First, we'll make sure that we can get the agent to return any value at all. User parameters are configured on the agent side—the agent daemon contains the key specification, which includes references to commands. On "A test host", edit zabbix_agentd.conf and look near the end of the file. An explanation of the syntax is available here:

UserParameter=<key>,<shell command>

This means that we can freely choose the...