All posts by Jekaterina Sizova

Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook: Interview with the Co-Author

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Sizova original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-6-it-infrastructure-monitoring-cookbook-interview-with-the-co-author/20122/

We say Zabbix is a universal monitoring system, which is true. In many cases, the Zabbix potential is limited only by knowledge and the ability to use all the functions properly. That is why various training materials, including books, are so important. Nathan Liefting and Brian van Baekel recently presented their new Monitoring Cookbook on Zabbix 6.0 features and made a huge contribution to the existing knowledge pool. One of the book’s authors kindly agreed to tell us more about the issue.

Hi, Nathan! A year ago, we already had an interview with you to mark the Zabbix 5 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook launch. And now, just a month after the release of Zabbix 6.0 LTS, you published a new version of the book devoted to the latest Zabbix version. How did you manage to do it so quickly?

The last interview was a lot of fun to work on, so I am glad to do one again. Thanks for having me.

Let me jump right in by saying it took a lot of Alpha releases to write all of the new content. Normally we are already on top of new features, compiling them from sources even, to inform the community about the Zabbix development process and make sure our knowledge is up to par to ensure the highest quality for our training. But, with this book, we took it to the next level. Using the early releases, we worked hard to get the book ready by giving ourselves a hard deadline of getting the book to market just 1 month after the official Zabbix 6 release while the publisher needed 3 weeks to perform the copy editing and such. It was challenging, as we didn’t know exactly which features were to be included, and how they were built. We wrote parts of the book without knowing the feature in-depth, during the development phase, as a result, we had to rewrite whole chapters to reflect the actual integration. In the end, we made it and the entire Zabbix community can now use our book to get their Zabbix 6 environment up and running right from the start, with the added benefit for us that we can serve our customers perfectly due to all our in-depth knowledge we’ve gained in the process.

Comparing these two issues, how much do their contents overlap? Should users who already have the 5.0 book consider buying this edition (Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook) as well?

It’s important to know that there is definitely an overlap in content. We specifically wanted to include that in the description for the book as well, as we don’t want anyone to think that all content has been remade.

That out of the way, there are a lot of new things as well. For example, all the new major Zabbix 6 features have been added like:

  • High Availability for Zabbix server
  • Business Service Monitoring (SLA’s)
  • The new widgets (Geomaps, single item and top hosts)
  • User roles
  • New trigger syntax

Not only that, but we also made sure to include all the new best practices. Redoing all the tags using the new tag policy and making sure all UI changes are included as well. Every recipe has had a Zabbix 6.0 touch-up and thus everything is current.

Even though it is a second edition you will find a lot of new things, and nothing has been left behind from the older Zabbix version. It can thus be a good purchase, even if you already own the Zabbix 5 version since there was a lot changed, added and improved in the product itself as well.

What background knowledge about Zabbix should the reader of this book have? Are you targeting more beginners or experienced software users?

We target both actually! A lot of technical books take you through the process of settings things up start-to-finish and we are no different. What is different with our Cookbook you don’t have to execute every single chapter to end up with the right result. This is a Packt Cookbook and everything in the cookbook format (as defined by the publisher) has to be able to be configured separately. You can follow the book from Chapter 1 Installing Zabbix and Getting Started Using the Frontend up until the end or you can pick any subject and dive right in.

It’s set up in such a way that it works for everyone, the very beginners and the more advanced users, we want to be there for the community as a whole, and not just the super experienced engineers.

Can you please tell us briefly about the book’s content, in particular, what challenging monitoring aspects have you managed to explain, making them easy to understand and implement?

We tried to include most of the important Zabbix subjects. You will find the basics in the book on Installing Zabbix, using the frontend and setting up users, groups and roles. But besides that, most types of monitoring are also included. We’ll discuss monitoring using the Zabbix agent, SNMP, ODBC, HTTP, JMX, dependent items, calculated/aggregated checks and even external checks.

Of course, Low-Level Discovery is also explained to make sure that we can automate the entity (items, triggers, etc.) creation. Besides that, we think that when working with monitoring data it is important to keep things structured. Thus, we also spend time on using the best practices to set up templates, and use methods like tags to easily filter out data and keep things structured.

For the real Zabbix gurus, we’ll even dive into using the Zabbix API and Python scripts to extend upon the Zabbix functionality. There really is something for everyone. Check out the full list of included subjects here.

Fun fact: Brian van Baekel has a cat named Zabbix

You probably got a lot of feedback and comments about the Zabbix 5 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook. Can you please share with us what people are saying?

Well, with a lot of pride I can say that the Zabbix 5 book was met with great reviews! We’re happy to be able to help out the Zabbix community because our goal with the book was to give people access to a bundle of Zabbix information. It can be a lot easier to get information in a book format, instead of having to search for separate resources on the internet.

The community has been great with their reviews and we’ve had compliments like

“I found this book a great resource for my network monitoring needs. It has everything I needed. The authors do a fantastic job at explaining Zabbix.

“Excellent book. Highly recommended for IT infrastructure monitoring. I was in the need of server and network devices monitoring so I tried Zabbix.”

We’re super happy with how well the books have been received and really appreciate all of the (Amazon) reviews people have left! If you have to book and would like to leave a review, it is much appreciated and we personally read all of them.

Where is the book available to purchase?

You can get your copy at our publisher’s website, Amazon, or a local retailer. Packt has a great network of suppliers throughout the world that might just have a copy for you. But you can always check out the links below to get your copy:

https://www.packtpub.com/product/zabbix-6-it-infrastructure-monitoring-cookbook-second-edition/9781803246918

https://www.amazon.com/Zabbix-Infrastructure-Monitoring-Cookbook-maintaining-ebook/product-reviews/B08NX17XT8/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews

We’re actually still looking to work with a publisher in Japan, China and/or other locations where a local language might help out the Zabbix community. If you have any ideas for that, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.

Time flies and the Zabbix 7.0 LTS version is also not too far off. Should the community expect a new book when the new release comes out?

We had a lot of fun working on this Zabbix 6 edition, but at the same time it has taken up a considerable part of our personal time to get this book ready for everyone again. As a full-time Zabbix engineer and Zabbix trainer for Opensource ICT Solutions, there isn’t much time left in the weeks to write. That means that writing is mostly done on the weekends.

But if we find the time to do it again, we’ll definitely get a Zabbix 7 edition out as well! Already trying to make a plan to see if it is in the cards for us again.

The post Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook: Interview with the Co-Author appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What a fantastic year it was!

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Sizova original https://blog.zabbix.com/what-a-fantastic-year-it-was/18253/

The year 2021 is coming to the end and what a year it has been for Zabbix! Thank you for spending this year with us – installing new versions of Zabbix, solving monitoring tasks on the forum and community groups, reading our blog posts and watching videos, attending our events, and much more.

Let’s look back at some of the Zabbix Highlights of the year.

Great Minds Think Alike

Thanks to our community and partners’ support, we have organized about 50 online meetups and meetings in English, Russian, Chinese, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Polish this year. The recordings of the presentations are always available on our events page.

Offline events also took place – Zabbix Conferences have been held in China and Japan – both events were available to attend online and in person.

We organized and held Zabbix Summit Online 2021, which had been visited by thousands of attendees from 130+ countries.

The Ongoing Development

Our integrations team has released 35 new integrations and monitoring templates during the year and is currently developing new in-demand solutions.

Our main page received a few extra tweaks with a new menu bar which makes it easier to navigate between the website sections. Plus, we have completely redesigned and updated the features page, providing a more in-depth overview of Zabbix monitoring solution capabilities.

We released Zabbix 5.4 version that came with scheduled PDF report generation, robust problem detection, advanced data aggregation, and other significant improvements demanded by Zabbix users.

We’ve been working hard on the new Zabbix 6.0 LTS version, developing the most required features. By the beginning of the new year, we’ll be ready to celebrate this long-awaited release together with you.

Knowledge is Power

We’ve been working on the Zabbix Series and have recorded a number of helpful educational videos. Be sure to check out the entire playlist.

We launched the one-day intensive training courses that allow Zabbix users to learn in-depth one specific monitoring topic at a time.

We’ve started a new weekly tradition of sharing the Handy Tips with you – the detailed how-tos where we briefly explain all the nuances of monitoring with Zabbix. Remember that all the handy tips are available in Zabbix Blog.

Finally, we have reached a meaningful internal milestone. In 2021, Zabbix international team has passed the 100-employee mark and continues to grow, becoming more powerful.

Setting the Course for New Achievements

Well, this year is over, and there’s a new one ahead – full of big plans and inspiring intentions. However, we’ll have time to talk about new goals later, but for now, have fun with the holidays! We wish you to enjoy the magic of this festive period and get charged with joy for the whole coming year!

Interview with Zabbix Summit Online 2021 speaker: Vittorio Cioe

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Sizova original https://blog.zabbix.com/interview-with-zabbix-summit-online-2021-speaker-vittorio-cioe/16599/

With two weeks to go until Zabbix Summit 2021, we continue to introduce you to our guest speakers. Vittorio Cioe is already known to our community – he has participated in various Zabbix events, such as Zabbix summits and meetups. This year’s Zabbix Summit is not an exception. We asked Vittorio to tell us a few words about himself and introduce the presentation he will deliver on November 25th.

Hi Vittorio, we are happy to see you among the speakers this year! Would you mind please uncovering what your paper is about?

Hi, happy to be at Zabbix Summit also this year! This year I will cover a topic that is growing interest in the market as far as I can see: infrastructure as code, to create reusable deployment scripts. I will take as an example a Zabbix deployment on Oracle Cloud, using MySQL as a Service. I have decided to go this way because Oracle Cloud is very strong on the infrastructure as code side, and Zabbix it is very straightforward to automate.

You’re already familiar with many of our users and event attendees, but our community is growing, and new members are definitely interested in learning more about the speakers. Tell us please about yourself and your professional activities.

I originally come from Italy but relocated to Poland several years ago. Professionally I am a technology enthusiast, and in the past, I have been working the Security and Digital Transformation space. Finally, 4 years ago I landed at MySQL, which previously I have been a user of. This has been quite an incredible journey which put me in contact with some really amazing technology companies, and among those, Zabbix.

What role does Zabbix play in your professional activities?

Zabbix is one of the Oracle MySQL partners with which we have been able to establish cooperation and I really enjoy working with.

What do you think makes Zabbix stand out from other monitoring solutions?

I believe that the real strength of Zabbix is that the product is Open Source, and it brings the power of an enterprise-level monitoring solution to the broader public which normally could not afford it, giving a lot of companies the possibility of growing.

Have you already seen the summit program and the topics that will be covered? Which presentations would you be interested in hearing yourself?

There are some really great speeches this year! I would really like to listen to the speech of Alexei Vladishev (Zabbix 6.0 LTS – The next great leap in monitoring) and Sergey Sorokin (Take Advantage of Zabbix Services Online).

Interview with Zabbix Summit Online 2021 speaker: Brian van Baekel

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Sizova original https://blog.zabbix.com/interview-with-zabbix-summit-online-2021-speaker-brian-van-baekel/16174/

We continue to introduce you to the speakers of Zabbix Summit Online 2021. Our next guest is Brian van Baekel – a known Zabbix evangelist and trainer who has educated hundreds of students on all the nuances of working with our monitoring system.

Hi Brian, you are often seen on Zabbix Blog – mainly as the author of technical posts. Tell us, where did you get so much practical experience in using Zabbix?

Well, I started with Zabbix in 2013 and have been working with it ever since. During those years I’ve seen so many different environments. Each with their own challenges. Every challenge forces you to find a new creative solution and if you come across it often enough, you gain experience! I started Opensource ICT Solutions in early 2018 and the only thing we do is Zabbix. Either consultancy, training, or support worldwide, as long as it is Zabbix related. So that is even more experience that’s growing day by day as we’re serving exciting customers around the globe!

Is it true that you started using Zabbix with version 1.8? In your opinion, what are the most significant changes in the Zabbix functionality when comparing Zabbix then and now?

Yes that’s true, the first Zabbix version I started with was 1.8 and at that point I was not impressed with it, to say at least. After a few weeks, I saw the potential and started to enjoy the product more and more. After some time, we upgraded to a newer version of Zabbix where Low-Level Discovery was introduced… and wow! That was (and still is) one of the most powerful things.

In general, it’s not just one significant change that impresses me most as there are countless small and major improvements. In my opinion, it’s better to look at the product as a whole and the most significant change is how mature the product became during those years. If you really want me to name some significant changes, I must think about 3:

  • Low-Level Discovery
  • Tags
  • Dashboards
At the Zabbix Summit 2021, we will be introducing version 6.0 to the community in detail. Have you checked out the roadmap yet? Please tell us, what improvements are you most excited about?

To be honest I am not only checking the roadmap on a weekly basis but following the development rather closely to make sure we can anticipate what’s going to be introduced so we know what to advise customers.

As our customers are mainly on the Long Term Support versions, I am extremely happy that what was introduced in 5.2 and 5.4 will be available in a Long Term Support release. Regarding the new features, I am really excited about BSM(Business Level Monitoring) which will give us a comprehensive look at services instead of hosts and their metrics. That’s extremely valuable. The second thing that seems promising is HA. Although we’re building HA setups ourselves on a weekly basis it’s nice to have something natively available in the product.

Can you tell us about the speech you are going to give at the Zabbix Summit 2021?

Yes of course! So, as I mentioned, working as a Zabbix consultant and trainer, I see a lot of different environments where we have to solve various challenges. One of those challenges I came across is SNMP monitoring where the devices that had to be monitored were totally not able to handle all the SNMP requests. Luckily, they are sending traps. The art is to receive the traps and utilize them in such a way that you know the status of that device within seconds without just relying on the received trap solely. If you’re creative enough, Zabbix allows you to cater for that. So I’m going to explain why you want SNMP polling combined with SNMP traps and how to react on those traps so that you know the complete status of that device. The higher-level message of this talk is “Zabbix is flexible enough. The product is not the limit, your creativity is! Think out of the box and the sky is the limit”

 

Revealing Zabbix Summit Online 2021 Agenda. Interview with Jacob Robinson

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Sizova original https://blog.zabbix.com/revealing-zabbix-summit-online-2021-agenda-interview-with-jacob-robinson/15803/

This year’s Zabbix Summit 2021 will take place online on October 21. We decided to introduce you to the speakers and reveal some of the topics that will be covered during the event. Our first interviewee will be Jacob Robinson, who is speaking at this year’s Zabbix summit for the first time.

Hi Jacob, we are pleased to welcome you! We mentioned above that this year would be your debut speaking at our big event about monitoring. What was your primary motivation for giving the talk?

Hi, thank you, that is correct it is my first time speaking at any Zabbix event. My goal is to help let others know the unique way I am using Zabbix so they may benefit from it. I would really like to expand the system I have built and find others to use it and potentially contribute requests and development. I hope that the talk sparks some interest in the community, and I can connect with some people to discuss it more.

Would you like please to uncover your speech a bit? What should summit attendees expect?

Sure, my speech explains a project I developed that automatically detects, identifies, and creates hosts in Zabbix so that users never need to manually create any hosts. It also obtains MAC addresses, switch port configurations, and many other host details that are automatically entered into Zabbix even over large corporate networks.

Can you tell us about yourself and your experience with Zabbix? What exciting projects have you worked on?

I have been using Zabbix for around 3 years now to provide global monitoring of AV, Networking, and Security for WeWork. Everything I have done at WeWork has been very exciting, there have been integrations with several APIs, developing a custom Okta integration with Zabbix, controlling thousands of televisions and tracking electricity cost savings with Zabbix, and the challenges involved with monitoring WeWork’s network of over 150,000 active hosts. I also run a small blog, monitoreverything.net, where I try to write detailed documentation of things that I have done in Zabbix.

Can you tell us about your professional plans? In addition, should we wait for you at the Zabbix Summit in the following years with new and insightful cases (maybe even offline in Riga, who knows)?

My last job was working as an Audio-Visual engineer, and I transitioned into a Systems Infrastructure engineer so I’m not sure what I will do next. I have been enjoying developing and supporting Zabbix so I will likely continue to do that. I plan to be in-person at Zabbix Summit when it is possible!