Watching my back and front with Zabbix
Zabbix is a network monitoring system which uses a central server and remote agents which report back to it. Today I setup my central server and after much document reading, and Google searching got it all configured and working with one agent. Going forward now that I’m familiar with the system the rest of the agents should be a lot easier to setup. Next task is to configure the screens.
During the server setup I ran into a few problems that you might have as well so read on and hopefully you’ll save yourself a lot of head scratching.
1. Zabbix doesn’t support SMTP-Auth. This is certainly a pain but thanks to this Forum Post it’s not that hard to work around. I started developing a patch to add in SMTP-Auth support and I might finish it off this week but I needed the alerts up and running right away so thats on hold.
2. Hosts, Items, Triggers, Actions oh my!
- Hosts are the systems you want to monitor, these need to have zabbix_agent/zabbix_agentd installed and configured for the server. When adding hosts select a template to get a bunch of default items/triggers out of the box, these will save you a lot of time.
- Items are things to watch IE. the amount of free space on a drive.
- Triggers are conditions of items that cause an alert. For example the amount of free space on partition /usr drops below 100MB
When you select a host template a lot of these will be setup so you’ll probably want to start off by just cloning/editing existing ones.
Thats really about it to get started I have personally just scratched the surface so I can’t go much further but this should be enough to get you up and running fast and give you some extra time to study the docs.
Grab Zabbix Today.