Having out-grown the included Zabbix Web Interface templates, I find myself more often than not, having to create new templates as well as entirely new ways of monitoring hardware and software. I often create custom discovery rules to dynamically create new items as services and devices change. This very powerful…
7 CommentsYear: 2016
Zabbix 3.2 Has Arrived – And It’s Awesome!
The next major release version of Zabbix is now available! Zabbix 3.2 brings both new features and many UI and performance improvements along with it. This release introduces many improvements and added functionality. Detailed release notes are available here: Zabbix 3.2.0 Release Notes Zabbix 3.2 – Highlights Event tags for…
1 CommentKeeping track of your Bonding Interfaces
Most Linux distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Debian etc.) offer the ability to bond multiple networks devices together into Bonding Interfaces, using the bonding kernel module. Bonding enables two or more network interfaces to act as one, which as a result can provide redundancy and additional bandwidth. The Linux bonding kernel module…
15 CommentsAlerts Must Be Actionable
One of the primary reasons of acquiring a monitoring solution, is to receive alerts of potential issues and correct them before they become issues. A classic scenario is that you start out by checking whether your hosts are replying to ICMP ping requests. You slowly become more curious and start…
Leave a CommentMonitor Temperature and Humidity with Zabbix
Temperature and humidity will have a substantial effect on the lifespan of your hardware. Almost all computers and servers have several temperature sensors for gathering component or ambient temperatures. Humidity sensors though, are often overlooked. With very few and inexpensive components, we can monitor both in Zabbix. In short, we…
51 CommentsTemplate: PowerDNS and PowerDNS Recursor
PowerDNS is a high-performance DNS server and recursor written in C++ and Zabbix can easily keep track of how it’s doing! It runs on most Unix variants. It features a large number of different back-ends ranging from simple BIND style zone files to relational databases and load balancing/failover algorithms. A…
3 CommentsTemplate: Are your servers blacklisted?
Most companies have a wide variety of services running, usually with public and private facing interfaces. If you are providing services like SMTP, DNS or similar to your customers, those services might be misused and you could end up getting your servers IP addresses blacklisted on various Domain Name System…
22 CommentsThe Correct Point of View
The entire purpose of monitoring, is making sure your systems and services are functioning as expected. As expected to who though? The point of view matters quite a bit here, both to a potential service end-user and to you as an administrator of said service. Take a classic LAMP setup…
Leave a CommentGuide: Installing Zabbix 3.0 on CentOS 7
This guide covers easily installing Zabbix 3.0 on CentOS 7 with a MySQL database back-end. No fuzz, just the basics to get things up and running. Recently Zabbix 3.0 was released and with it came a ton of great new features as well as an overhaul of the web UI…
12 CommentsMonitor network services automatically
It is extremely important to monitor network services and their connectivity. At any given time, there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of services running on your servers. Many of those have to be reachable over a network. Web services need to be available typically on port 80 and/or 443, FTP services…
1 Comment