Imagine you're celebrating the start of the weekend with Friday-night drinks with a few friends. And then suddenly your phone rings -- one of the servers you administer has gone down, and it needs to be back up before tomorrow morning. So you drag yourself back to the office, only to discover that some log files have been growing more than usual over the past few weeks and have filled up the hard drive.

While the scenario above is very simplistic, something similar has happened to most IT workers at one or another point in their careers. To avoid such situations this book will teach you to monitor your network hardware, servers, and web performance using Zabbix- an open source system monitoring and reporting solution.

The versatility of Zabbix allows monitoring virtually anything, but getting started with the new concepts can take some time. This book will take you through the most common tasks in a hands-on, step by step manner.

Zabbix is a very flexible IT monitoring suite, but not every part of it is immediately clear to new users. Following the instructions in this book should allow you to set up monitoring of various metrics on various devices, including Linux and Windows machines, SNMP devices, IPMI enabled server,s and other network attached equipment. You will learn to define conditions - such a temperature being too high or service being down - and act upon them by notifying user by email, SMS, or even restarting service. You will learn to visualize the gathered data with graphs and the various tips and tricks that are provided will help to use Zabbix more efficiently and avoid common pitfalls.

This book covers setting up Zabbix from the scratch and gradually introduces basic components of Zabbix, moving to more advanced topics later. Book's scope is based on the author's experience of working with Zabbix for many years, as well as on the questions users have asked on the Zabbix IRC channel and forums.

Monitor your network with ease using the open source Zabbix suite with this hands-on, practical guide

What you will learn from this book

• Monitor servers that runs on most Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris, as well as Windows boxes
• Use proxies to monitor remote locations
• Visualize gathered data with graphs, pie charts, network maps, and other elements
• Directly monitor your SNMP (v1, 2, and 3) and IPMI devices
• Monitor any possible source of data with flexible user parameters
• Simplify and streamline your Zabbix configuration using templates
• Monitor your network by creating reports and charts using the built-in reporting capabilities of Zabbix
• Learn about the best options for showing data on a large display for help desk or technical personnel

Approach

This is a hand-on step-by-step book in a tutorial style. All configuration steps that are required to reach goals are explained in detail that should leave no reader stuck. Exact commands are provided for setting up and testing the configuration and screenshots of the user interface allow you to be sure that you are using the correct interface section. The author's experience with Zabbix enables him to share insights on using Zabbix effectively, in a clear and friendly way.

Who this book is written for

This book assumes no experience with Zabbix and minimal experience with Linux. Knowledge provided by this book, will be useful if:

• you are responsible for managing in-house IT infrastructure such as network hardware, servers, and web pages
• you are responsible for managing non-IT infrastructure that provides data such as temperature, flow, and other readings
• you have clients with strict accessibility requirements and want to monitor hardware that provides services to them
• you are a system administrator who wants to monitor the network hardware, servers, and web performance