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


Just when you thought things couldn't get any better, you notice that Zabbix has support for external checks. This means that Zabbix will run a script or a binary from a specific location, without the need of any agent running on the host that we want to monitor.

Getting ready

For this setup, we need our Zabbix server with a host that can be reached by the Zabbix server. There is no need to install a Zabbix agent on the host as we will make use of our own scripts to run some checks.

How to do it …

  1. Creating external checks is very easy in Zabbix. First thing we need to verify is where to put them on our Zabbix server. This can be done by looking in the configuration file of the Zabbix server in the zabbix_server.conf file. Here we see the option ExternalScripts where we can specify the location or use the standard one:

    ExternalScripts=/usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts
  2. In this location, we will place our script. For example we could check the number of cores available on our host....