Zabbix open source monitoring

ZABBIX (visit http://www.zabbix.com) is an open source distributed monitoring solution for enterprise level applications. It is capable of providing detailed networking information as well as polling servers to establish their health.

ZABBIX was created by Alexei Vladishev, and currently is actively developed and
supported by ZABBIX SIA.

It is possible to configure ZABBIX to email alerts to the administrator for just about any event. This means that even if you have several servers to watch you will be able to react quickly to any arising problem.

ZABBIX code is released under the GPL2 license ( General Public License 2 ). It is free to use and requires no licensing fees. The ZABBIX company offers both free and commercial support options.

My company currently has 8 production servers, three of which host mission critical applications and databases. It is possible for one of our operations staff to remotely login to each machine, check the status of the applications, do a trace on the database, check the logs... do you see how time consuming this can be? Of course we're also assuming that the operations staff is willing to do this 24/7!

Today I'll be implementing this open source solution. Lets see how it goes :)

Update

I've now been using Zabbix for some time and have found it to be a generally positive experience. It does a good job of monitoring my servers, is fairly intuitive to set up, and has even landed our company a support contract. One thing that did bother me is that it insists on using a PHP function that the official PHP guide views as not being ready for production (see my later post here). I posted a question on the Zabbix forums and received no feedback from the community.

Oddly the most difficult part of getting Zabbix working was to reconfigure the rules on my firewall. I've inherited a messy set of rules, many of which apply to conditions that have ceased to exist within the company. Integrating new rules into this spaghetti requires concentration.

My next Zabbix challenge will be to implement the SMS send routines with a GSM modem. The documentation suggests that this should be easy as Zabbix natively supports SMS notification. Experience has shown me that very little promised in Linux documentation actually comes true. No doubt there will be a driver incompatibility, some software problem, or some other reason to make Zabbix misbehave.

Comments

Solving Doctrine - A new entity was found through the relationship

There are so many different problems that people have with the Doctrine error message: exception 'Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException' with message 'A new entity was found through the relationship 'App\Lib\Domain\Datalayer\UnicodeLookups#lookupStatus' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Searching through the various online sources was a bit of a nightmare. The best documentation I found was at http://www.krueckeberg.org/ where there were a number of clearly explained examples of various associations. More useful information about association ownership was in the Doctrine manual , but I found a more succinct explanation in the answer to this question on StackOverflow . Now I understood better about associations and ownership and was able to identify exactly what sort I was using and the syntax that was required. I was implementing a uni-directional many to one relationship, which is supposedly one of the most simpl...

Grokking PHP monolog context into Elastic

An indexed and searchable centralized log is one of those tools that once you've had it you'll wonder how you managed without it. I've experienced a couple of advantages to using a central log - debugging, monitoring performance, and catching unknown problems. Debugging Debugging becomes easier because instead of poking around grepping text logs on servers you're able to use a GUI to contrast and compare values between different time ranges. A ticket will often include sparse information about the problem and observed error, but if you know more or less when a problem occurred then you can check the logs of all your systems at that time. Problem behaviour in your application can occur as a result of the services you depend on. A database fault will produce errors in your application, for example. If you log your database errors and your application errors in the same central platform then it's much more convenient to compare behaviour between...

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted. This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel. A thorough comparison of the patterns is available here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework. It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database. Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

Adventures in IT

Search This Blog