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

Starting with the Zabbix API


The approaches we looked at earlier—direct database edits and XML import/export—were either risky or limited. Editing the database is risky because there is very little validation, and upgrading to a newer version of Zabbix can change the database schema, making our tools and approaches invalid. XML import/export was nice, but very limited—it did not allow modifying users, network discovery rules, actions lots, and lots of things in the Zabbix configuration.

This is where the Zabbix API could help. It is a JSON-based interface to Zabbix configuration and data. It offers way more functionality than XML import/export does, although there are still bits and pieces of configuration that cannot be controlled using it.

The Zabbix API currently is frontend based: it is implemented in PHP. To use it, we connect to the web server running the frontend and issue our requests. There are a lot of ways to do this, but here, we will try to do things in a manner that is language...