Ever since I started working with IT infrastructure, I have been noticing that almost every company, when they start thinking about a monitoring tool, think of trying to know in some way when the system or service will go down before it actually happens. They expect the monitoring tool to create some kind of alert when something is broken. But by this approach, the system administrator will know about an error or system outage only after the error occurs (and maybe, at the same time, users are trying to use those systems).
We need a monitoring solution to help us predict system outages and any other situation that our services can be affected by. Our approach with monitoring tools should cover not only our system monitoring but also our business monitoring.
Nowadays, any company (small, medium, or large) has some dependency on technologies, from servers and network assets to IP equipment with a lower environmental impact. Maybe you need security cameras, thermometers, UPS, access control devices, or any other IP device by which you can gather some useful data. What about applications and services? What about data integration or transactions? What about user experience? What about a supplier website or system that you depend on?
We should realize that monitoring things is not restricted to IT infrastructure, and it can be extended to other areas and business levels as well.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- Zabbix—the initial steps
- The natural growth
- Beyond infrastructure
- The Internet of Things wave
- Everyone knows about Zabbix
- Things we never thought about
- Talking about performance
Suppose you already have your Zabbix server up and running. In a few weeks, Zabbix has helped you save a lot of time while restoring systems. It has also helped you notice some hidden things in your environment—maybe a flapping port in a network switch, or lack of CPU in a router.
In a few months, Zabbix and you (of course) are like superstars. During lunch, people are talking about you. Some are happy because you've dealt with a recurring error. Maybe, a manager asks you to find a way to monitor a printer because it's very important to their team, another manager asks you to monitor an application, and so on.
The other teams and areas also need some kind of monitoring. They have other things to monitor, not only IT things. But are these people familiar with technical things? Technical words, expressions, flows, and lines of thoughts are not so easy for people with nontechnical backgrounds to understand.
Of course, in small and medium enterprises (SME), things will go ahead faster and paths will be shorter, but the scenario is not too different in most cases. You can work alone or in a huge team, but now you have another important partner—Zabbix.
An immutable fact is that monitoring things comes with more and more responsibility and reliability. At this point, we have some new issues to solve:
- How do we create and authenticate a user?
When Zabbix's visibility starts growing in your environment, you will need to think how to manage and handle these users. Do you have an LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory that you can use for centralized authentication? Of course, depending on the users you have, you will have more requests. Will you permit any user to access the Zabbix interface? Only a few? And which ones?
- Is it necessary to create a custom monitor?
We know that Zabbix has a lot of built-in keys for gathering data. These keys are available for a good number of operating systems. We also have built-in functions used to gather data using the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), Java Management Extensions (JMX), user parameters in the Zabbix agent, and so on. However, we need to think about a wide scenario where we need to gather data from somewhere Zabbix hasn't reached yet.
Our experience shows us that most of the time, it is necessary to create custom monitors (not one, but a lot of them). Zabbix is a very flexible and easy-to-customize platform. It is possible to make Zabbix do anything you want. However, to learn every new function or to monitor Zabbix, you'll need to think about what kind of extension you'll use.
- More functions, more data, more load, and more TCP connections!
This means that when other teams or areas start putting light on Zabbix, you will need to think about the number of new functions or monitors you will need to get. Then, which language to choose to develop these new things? Maybe you know the C language and you are thinking of using Zabbix modules. Will you use bulk operations to avoid network traffic?