Zabbix Network Monitoring - Second Edition电子书

Zabbix Network Monitoring Second Edition

Table of Contents

Zabbix Network Monitoring Second Edition

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Getting Started with Zabbix

The first steps in monitoring

Zabbix features and architecture

Installation

Choosing the version and repository

Hardware requirements

Installing from the packages

RHEL/CentOS

EPEL

The Zabbix repository

OpenSUSE

Installing from source

The server and agent

Software requirements

Downloading the source

Compilation

Dash or underscore?

Initial configuration

Creating and populating the database

Starting up

Using systemd

Verifying the service's state

The web frontend

Prerequisites and setting up the environment

Using the web frontend configuration wizard

Step 1 – welcome

Step 2 – PHP prerequisites

Step 3 – database access

Step 4 – Zabbix server details

Step 5 – summary

Step 6 – writing the configuration file

Step 7 – finishing the wizard

Step 8 – logging in

Summary

2. Getting Your First Notification

Exploring the frontend

The user profile

Monitoring quickstart

Creating a host

Creating an item

Introducing simple graphs

Creating triggers

Configuring e-mail parameters

Creating an action

Information flow in Zabbix

Let's create some load

Basic item configuration

Monitoring categories

Availability

Performance

Security

Management

Efficiency

Item types

How items can be monitored

Using global search

Summary

3. Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols

Using the Zabbix agent

Passive items

Cloning items

Manually querying items

Active items

An active agent with multiple servers

Supported items

Choosing between active and passive items

Item scheduling

Simple checks

Setting up ICMP checks

Tying it all together

Key parameter quoting

Positional parameters for item names

Using mass update

Value mapping

Units

Custom intervals

Flexible intervals

Custom scheduling

Copying items

Summary

4. Monitoring SNMP Devices

Using Net-SNMP

Using SNMPv3 with Net-SNMP

The engine ID

Authentication, encryption, and context

Adding new MIBs

Polling SNMP items in Zabbix

Translating SNMP OIDs

Dynamic indexes

SNMP bulk requests

Receiving SNMP traps

Using embedded Perl code

Filtering values by received data

Filtering values by originating host

Debugging

Handling the temporary file

SNMP Trap Translator

Using a custom script

Filtering the traps

Custom mapping

Database lookups

Summary

5. Managing Hosts, Users, and Permissions

Hosts and host groups

Host inventory

Editing inventory data manually

Populating inventory data automatically

Host maintenance

Creating maintenance periods

Collecting data during maintenance

Not collecting data during maintenance

Maintenance period options

One-time only maintenance

Daily maintenance

Weekly maintenance

Monthly maintenance

Ad-hoc maintenance

Users, user groups, and permissions

Authentication methods

Creating a user

Creating user groups

Permissions and maintenance

Summary

6. Detecting Problems with Triggers

Triggers

The trigger-and-item relationship

Trigger dependencies

Constructing trigger expressions

Preventing trigger flapping

Checking for missing data

Triggers that time out

Triggers with adaptable thresholds

Triggers with a limited period

Relative thresholds or time shift

Verifying system time

Human-readable constants

Customizing trigger display

Trigger severities

Trigger display options

Event details

Event generation and hysteresis

Summary

7. Acting upon Monitored Conditions

Actions

Limiting conditions when alerts are sent

Additional action conditions

Complex conditions

Dependencies and actions

Media limits for users

Sending out notifications

Using macros

Sending recovery messages

Escalating things

Runner analogy

Using scripts as media

Integration with issue management systems

Bugzilla

Computer Associates Unicenter Service Desk Manager

Atlassian JIRA

Remote commands

Global scripts

Configuring global scripts

Reusing global scripts in actions

Summary

8. Simplifying Complex Configurations with Templates

Identifying template candidates

Creating a template

Linking templates to hosts

Handling default templates

Changing the configuration in a template

Macro usage

User macros

Using multiple templates

Unlinking templates from hosts

Using mass update

Nested templates

Summary

9. Visualizing Data with Graphs and Maps

Visualize what?

Individual elements

Graphs

Simple graphs

Ad hoc graphs

Custom graphs

Working time and trigger line

Graph item function

Two y axes

Item sort order

Gradient line and other draw styles

Custom y axis scale

Percentile line

Stacked graphs

Pie graphs

Maps

Creating a map

Linking map elements

Selecting links

Routed and invisible links

Further map customization

Macros in labels

Link labels

Reflecting problems on map elements

Available map elements

Map filtering

Custom icons and background images

Icon mapping

Other global map options

Displaying host group elements

Numbers as icons

Sharing the maps

Summary

10. Visualizing Data with Screens and Slideshows

Screens

Dynamic screens

Additional screen elements

Templated screens

Slide shows

Showing data on a big display

Challenges

Non-interactive display

Information overload

Displaying a specific section automatically

Summary

11. Advanced Item Monitoring

Log file monitoring

Monitoring a single file

Filtering for specific strings

Monitoring rotated files

Alerting on log data

Extracting part of the line

Parsing timestamps

Viewing log data

Reusing data on the server

Calculated items

Quoting in calculated items

Referencing items from multiple hosts

Aggregate items

Aggregating across multiple groups

User parameters

Just getting it to work

Querying data that the Zabbix agent does not support

Flexible user parameters

Level of the details monitored

Environment trap

Things to remember about user parameters

Wrapper scripts

When not to use user parameters

External checks

Finding a certificate expiry time

Determining certificate validity

Sending in the data

Using an agent daemon configuration file

Sending values from a file

Sending timestamped values

SSH and Telnet items

SSH items

Telnet items

Custom modules

Summary

12. Automating Configuration

Low-level discovery

Network interface discovery

Automatically creating calculated items

Automatically creating triggers

Automatically creating graphs

Filtering discovery results

Filesystem discovery

Introducing the LLD JSON format

Including discovered graphs in screens

Custom thresholds with user macro context

CPU discovery

SNMP discovery

Creating custom LLD rules

Re-implementing CPU discovery

Discovering MySQL databases

Global regular expressions

Testing global regexps

Usage in the default templates

Network discovery

Configuring a discovery rule

Viewing the results

Reacting to the discovery results

Uniqueness criteria

Active agent autoregistration

Auto-registration metadata

Summary

13. Monitoring Web Pages

Monitoring a simple web page

Creating a web-monitoring scenario

Other scenarios and step properties

Alerting on web scenarios

Logging in to the Zabbix interface

Step 1: check the first page

Step 2: log in

Step 3: check login

Step 4: log out

Step 5: check logout

Authentication options

Using agent items

Getting the page

Checking page performance

Extracting content from web pages

Summary

14. Monitoring Windows

Installing the Zabbix agent for Windows

Querying performance counters

Using numeric references to performance counters

Using aliases for performance counters

Averaging performance counters over time

Querying WMI

Monitoring Windows services

Checking automatic services

Service discovery

Windows event log monitoring

Summary

15. High-Level Business Service Monitoring

Deciding on the service tree

Setting up IT services

Creating test items and triggers

Configuring IT services

Sending in the data

Viewing reports

Specifying uptime and downtime

Summary

16. Monitoring IPMI Devices

Getting an IPMI device

Preparing for IPMI monitoring

Setting up IPMI items

Creating an IPMI item

Monitoring discrete sensors

Using the bitwise trigger function

Summary

17. Monitoring Java Applications

Setting up the Zabbix Java gateway

Monitoring JMX items

Querying JMX items manually

What to monitor?

Summary

18. Monitoring VMware

Preparing for VMware monitoring

Automatic discovery

Available metrics

The underlying operation

VMware LLD configuration

Host prototypes

Summarizing default template interaction

Server operation and configuration details

Summary

19. Using Proxies to Monitor Remote Locations

Active proxy, passive proxy

Setting up an active proxy

Monitoring a host through a proxy

Proxy benefits

Proxy limitations

Proxy operation

Proxies and availability monitoring

Method 1 – Last access item

Method 2 – Internal proxy buffer item

Method 3 – Custom proxy buffer item

Setting up a passive proxy

Tweaking the proxy configuration

Summary

20. Encrypting Zabbix Traffic

Overview

Backend libraries

Pre-shared key encryption

Certificate-based encryption

Being our own authority

Setting up Zabbix with certificates

Concerns and further reading

Summary

21. Working Closely with Data

Getting raw data

Extracting from the frontend

Querying the database

Using data in a remote site

Diving further into the database

Managing users

Changing existing data

Finding out when

The when in computer language

Finding out what

Performing the change

Using XML import/export for configuration

Exporting the initial configuration

Modifying the configuration

The XML export format

Scripting around the export

Importing modified configuration

Generating hosts

Importing images

Starting with the Zabbix API

Simple operations

Obtaining the API version

Logging in

Enabling and disabling hosts

Creating a host

Deleting a host

Creating a value map

Obtaining history and trends

Issues with the Zabbix API

Using API libraries

Further reading

Summary

22. Zabbix Maintenance

Internal monitoring

New values per second

Zabbix server uptime

Cache usage

Internal process busy rate

Unsupported items and more problems

Counting unsupported items

Reviewing unsupported items

Internal events and unknown triggers

Backing things up

Backing up the database

Restoring from a backup

Separating configuration and data backups

Upgrading Zabbix

General version policy

Long-term support and short-term support

The upgrade process

Minor version upgrade

Upgrading binaries

Upgrading the frontend

Major-level upgrades

Database versioning

Gathering data during the upgrade

The frontend configuration file

Compatibility

Performance considerations

Who did that?

Exploring configuration file parameters

Zabbix agent daemon and common parameters

Zabbix server daemon parameters

Summary

A. Troubleshooting

Chapter introduction

Common issues

Installation

Compilation

Frontend

Backend

Locked out of the frontend

Monitoring

General monitoring

Monitoring with the Zabbix agent

User parameters

SNMP devices

IPMI monitoring

ICMP checks

Problems with simple checks

Problems with zabbix_sender and trapper items

General issues

Triggers

Actions

Discoveries and autoregistration

Troubleshooting Zabbix

The Zabbix log file format

Reloading the configuration cache

Controlling running daemons

Runtime process status

Further debugging

B. Being Part of the Community

Community and support

Chatting on IRC

Using the Zabbix wiki

Using the Zabbix forum

Filing issues on the tracker

Meeting in person

The Zabbix conference

Local communities

Following the development

Getting the source

Daily snapshots

Accessing the version control system

Looking at the changesets

Translating Zabbix

Commercial support options

Index