Book Image

Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy

By : Rihards Olups, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Andrea Dalle Vacche
Book Image

Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy

By: Rihards Olups, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Andrea Dalle Vacche

Overview of this book

Nowadays, monitoring systems play a crucial role in any IT environment. They are extensively used to not only measure your system’s performance, but also to forecast capacity issues. This is where Zabbix, one of the most popular monitoring solutions for networks and applications, comes into the picture. With an efficient monitoring system in place, you’ll be able to foresee when your infrastructure runs under capacity and react accordingly. Due to the critical role a monitoring system plays, it is fundamental to implement it in the best way from its initial setup. This avoids misleading, confusing, or, even worse, false alarms that can disrupt an efficient and healthy IT department. This course is for administrators who are looking for an end-to-end monitoring solution. It will get you accustomed with the powerful monitoring solution, starting with installation and explaining the fundamentals of Zabbix. Moving on, we explore the complex functionalities of Zabbix in the form of enticing recipes. These recipes will help you to gain control of your infrastructure. You will be able to organize your data in the form of graphs and charts along with building intelligent triggers for monitoring your network proactively. Toward the end, you will gain expertise in monitoring your networks and applications using Zabbix. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: Zabbix Network Monitoring-Second Edition Zabbix Cookbook Mastering Zabbix-Second Edition
Table of Contents (51 chapters)
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Montioring Made Easy
Credits
Preface
6
Detecting Problems with Triggers
7
Acting upon Monitored Conditions
Bibliography
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...