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

Proxies versus nodes


At first sight, it could seem that nodes are much more powerful and flexible than proxies. While that is certainly true to a certain extent, it doesn't mean that they are automatically the preferred solution to every distributed monitoring scenario. In fact, there are a number of drawbacks to using nodes.

Disadvantages of nodes

First of all, every node is a full server, with a full-blown database and web frontend. This means more expensive hardware than that required by a proxy, but most of all, this means a lot more maintenance in terms of day-to-day system and database administration, backups, security policy compliance, and so on. It's also not easy to move nodes around once they are configured, and while they do send data upstream to the master node, they still need to be managed one-by-one as single entities. You can't mass-update hosts or items across nodes, for example. More importantly, if you update a template that is used by more than one node, you'll have to...