Monitoring with Zabbix

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Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Thomas Drilling

Nagios might be the best known free monitoring tool, but Zabbix has steadily gained ground over the years and is now set to challenge the market leader. In this article, we look at basic Zabbix functionality and introduce you to items, triggers, and actions.

Back in 2001, Alexei Vladishev started working on a monitoring tool called Zabbix. Today, he is the owner and product manager of Zabbix SIA in Riga, Latvia, and Zabbix is a comprehensive tool for monitoring networks, servers, devices, and other IT resources that offers numerous visualization options. Like other tools of this type, Zabbix dispatches email messages, text messages, or instant messages in case of emergency.

In contrast to its main competitor, Nagios, Zabbix doesn't just display monitoring information in a web interface or a special browser plugin, it also supports full configuration of the hosts to be monitored in the browser. Zabbix uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or Oracle RDBMS to store data. The web interface is programmed throughout in PHP and offers both "simple checks" for monitoring standard services like SMTP or HTTP, and a number of agents for various operating systems that help administrators collect a variety of data for graphical representation on the Zabbix web front end.

Zabbix does not excel at checking outward-facing services such as FTP, SSH, or HTTP with built-in tools; it is essential to install one of the agents for professional use. Additionally, Zabbix supports SNMP as a means of collecting information. One of the tool's biggest benefits, compared with its competitors, besides the ability to configure host monitoring directly in the web interface, is the ability to combine actions, items, and triggers conveniently. Another notable feature is its management of graphs, screens, and maps – in particular, the very elegant way it displays individual hosts in various map types (geographical, infrastructure, and so on), which is part of the default installation scope.