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

External checks


All the check categories we explored before cover a very wide range of possible devices, but there's always that one which doesn't play well with standard monitoring protocols, can't have the agent installed, and is buggy in general. A real-life example would be a UPS that provides temperature information on the web interface, but does not provide this data over SNMP. Or maybe we would like to collect some information remotely that Zabbix does not support yet—for example, monitoring how much time an SSL certificate has until it expires.

In Zabbix, such information can be collected with external checks or external scripts. While user parameters are scripts run by the Zabbix agent, external check scripts are run directly by the Zabbix server.

First, we should figure out the command to find out the remaining certificate validity period. We have at least two options here:

  • Return the time when the certificate expires

  • Return 0 or 1 to identify that the certificate expires in some period...