Tag Archives: community

Code, karaoke, and creativity: Meet Matthew

Post Syndicated from Sophie Ashford original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/code-karaoke-and-creativity-meet-matthew/

We love hearing from members of the community and sharing stories of amazing young people, volunteers, and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.

It’s especially inspiring to hear about young people who are not only passionate about technology, but who are also driven to share that passion with others. Meet Matthew, a 15-year-old creator and youth mentor at Code Club, who builds his own projects and inspires peers by organising hackathons.

Matthew and his team at Cool as Hack at the RPF offices
Matthew and his team at Cool as Hack at the RPF offices

Matthew’s early experience with coding 

Matthew’s journey into the world of coding began at a young age. His initial exposure was through Scratch at school in Singapore. From there, he began exploring self-learn platforms in his own time, getting to grips with HTML and basic web development.

His enthusiasm for creating led him to participate in a technology week in Year 6, where he took on a BBC micro:bit challenge. He dedicated his summer holiday to developing a token system that encouraged community recycling, using an ultrasonic sensor to award points for good behaviour. This early project showcased his knack for problem-solving and innovation.

What truly captivated Matthew was the possibility of combining the logical challenges of competitive programming with the joy of project creation.

Matthew with his device developed in Year 6 to promote recycling behaviour in his residential community
Matthew with his device developed in Year 6 to promote recycling behaviour in his residential community

Connecting with the community

Through YouthHacks, an initiative he co-founded to support teenage hackathon organisers, Matthew aims to expand access to hackathons across the UK (a hackathon is an event where individuals or teams work intensively over a relatively short time period to build software, hardware, or other kinds of technology). Matthew wants to offer advice and support, making it easier for young people to run their own hackathons. He puts a lot of time into ensuring that the content and atmosphere truly resonate with the participants.

“So, we made YouthHacks basically as an idea to be able to support these teenage organisers, you know, like hackathons for teenagers by teenagers.”

Matthew’s connection with the Raspberry Pi Foundation came from his keen interest in the hackathon community and a need for a local venue. Having previously toured the Foundation’s offices for a school robotics club, he decided to reach out when organising a satellite hackathon called Counterspell.

This initial collaboration led to further events at the Foundation, including Scrapyard Cambridge and, more recently, Cool as Hack.

Coolest Projects hackathon: A new approach to collaborative coding 

Cool as Hack was Matthew’s third event held at the Raspberry Pi Foundation offices. Unlike traditional hackathons with intense time pressure, this event, inspired by the spirit of Coolest Projects, aimed to be more relaxed and collaborative. 

“For this, people could bring in their own project scraps and then they could put it together with a team, finalise it, and then enter it to Coolest Projects.” 

The focus was on showcasing creativity and sharing projects globally, rather than competitive prizes. Everyone then entered their creations into the Coolest Projects online showcase.

Young coders at Cool as Hack
Cool as Hack in progress at RPF HQ. Credit: W O Wallace

Cool as Hack was a huge success. The atmosphere was incredible — there was even a karaoke session and a “swag shop” where participants could exchange tokens earned for innovative ideas or project milestones. This token system, designed by Matthew and harking back to his own recycling project from years ago, created a fun and engaging reward system.

Inspiring the next generation

Matthew’s drive to organise these events and encourage other young people to code stems from his enjoyment of project creation and the community aspect of hackathons. 

“Well, I suppose it links back to me enjoying making projects and when you attend a hackathon, it’s not a competition really. It’s more of a social event. So, you’re making a project and then you’re meeting quite a lot of coders, or even artists and musicians, and so many other people.”

Young coders at Cool as Hack at the RPF offices
All of the creators that took part in Cool as Hack. Credit: W O Wallace

Now a regular volunteer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s monthly Code Club in Cambridge, Matthew remains focused on encouraging others into tech. For aspiring young coders, he says that coding is far more diverse and creative than many might initially perceive, encompassing art, storytelling, and problem-solving. Matthew’s advice is simple: 

“Enjoy the process and as you learn new things you’ll realise that all of this is like super interesting, and that there are so many ways to make what you want. Just enjoy it and continue meeting new people and, yeah, be creative.” 

Matthew’s journey shows how an intro to computing at a young age can lead to an incredible amount of impact. With his continued dedication, he’s sure to inspire many more young minds to start on their own coding adventures.

If you would like to explore coding, you can get started at home with over 250 free projects. 

Looking for a little extra support in your own coding journey or open to mentoring others? Join a Code Club near you to meet a like-minded and supportive community.

The post Code, karaoke, and creativity: Meet Matthew appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

What’s new in Zabbix 7.4

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-new-in-zabbix-7-4/30597/

With the release of Zabbix 7.4, Zabbix users will be able to further extend their existing resource discovery workflows and enjoy a wastly improved user experience when it comes to configuring Zabbix entities. In addition, the latest release introduces multiple dashboard and network map improvements which will further enhance the visualization of infrastructure and resources.

Host Wizard

Host creation can be somewhat confusing for Zabbix beginners. Creating a host and applying a template involves numerous steps – from creating a host and assigning it to a host group, to configuring appropriate host interfaces, applying a template, and editing template-level macros to adjust the default problem thresholds and filters.

The Host Wizard aims to simplify the host onboarding process by providing a step-by-step guide for creating and configuring a host.

The Host Wizard can be opened from the Data Collection – Hosts section

A new Host Wizard button has been added to the Data Collection – Hosts section. Once you click on it, you will first have to select the template you wish to apply on the new host. Only one template can be applied at a time, so if you wish to apply multiple templates on a single host via Host Wizard, you will have to do so via one template and one Host Wizard session at a time.

Under the hood, if we look at the template files, the templates have also received 2 new parameters: wizard_ready and readme. Only templates marked with wizard_ready: ‘YES’ can be selected in the Host Wizard.

Filter for and select the required template

After you have selected the template, you will be prompted to enter a host name and select host groups. You can create a new host or apply the template on an existing host.

Provide a host name and select host groups

The next steps include the deployment instructions. Depending on the selected template type, the Host Wizard will provide all of the required instructions to start monitoring the host with the chosen template.

The Host Wizard will provide the required host configuration steps

In the final Host Wizard steps, you will be prompted to add the required host interface, read the template notes, and customize the template-level macros.

Customize template-level macros to modify the default filters, problem thresholds, and other parameters

Nested low-level discovery rules and host prototypes

Low-level discovery rules have received major improvements in Zabbix 7.4. It is now possible to create nested low-level discovery rules, while host prototypes are now capable of discovering hosts of their own with low-level discovery.

A new type of prototype has been added to low-level discovery rules – discovery prototype. These prototypes are used together with low-level discovery macros to automatically create low-level discovery rules for resource discovery.

Discovery prototypes can now be created in low-level discovery rules

A new item type has been added for discovery rule prototypes – Nested. This type of discovery rule iterates through the JSON file received by the parent low-level discovery rule to discover child entities. For example:

[   {     "database": "db1",     "created_at": "2024-02-01T12:30:00Z",     "encoding": "UTF8",     "tablespaces": [       { "name": "ts1", "max_size": "10GB" },       { "name": "ts2", "max_size": "20GB" },       { "name": "ts3", "max_size": "15GB" }     ]   },   {     "database": "db2",     "created_at": "2023-11-15T08:45:00Z",     "encoding": "UTF16",     "tablespaces": [       { "name": "ts1", "max_size": "5GB" },       { "name": "ts2", "max_size": "25GB" },       { "name": "ts3", "max_size": "30GB" }     ]   },   {     "database": "db3",     "created_at": "2024-01-05T15:10:00Z",     "encoding": "UTF8",     "tablespaces": [       { "name": "ts1", "max_size": "12GB" },       { "name": "ts2", "max_size": "18GB" },       { "name": "ts3", "max_size": "22GB" }     ]   } ]

If we set the jsonpath preprocessing in the discovery rule prototype to JSONPath=$.tablespaces and set the low-level discovery macro to {#TSNAME}=$.name, the nested low-level discovery rule will create discovery rules to discover tablespaces for each database.

Low-level discovery rules are created from the discovery prototype

Inline form validation

Inline validation has been introduced with the goal of improving the overall user experience when configuring a variety of Zabbix entities. As of Zabbix 7.4, inline form validation is supported in:

  • Host configuration
  • Template configuration
  • Item configuration
  • Trigger configuration
Inline validation detects any configuration errors on the fly and displays a corresponding error message

With inline validation in place, users will now receive immediate feedback regarding any configuration mistakes they have made in the sections above. Configuring new entities, especially items and triggers with complex keys and expressions, is now faster than ever.

Frontend-to-server communication encryption

To further strengthen Zabbix communication flow security, Zabbix 7.4 introduces the ability to secure frontend to server communication with certificate encryption. The encryption must be configured from two sides, and the frontend setup now includes the options to enable and configure encrypted connections to the server.

 

Zabbix 7.4 introduces the ability to encrypt frontend-to-server connections

On the Zabbix server side, multiple new configuration parameters have been added:

  • TLSFrontendAccept – which incoming connections to accept from frontend
  • TLSFrontendCertIssuer – allowed frontend certificate issuer
  • TLSFrontendCertSubject – allowed frontend certificate subject
  • FrontendAllowedIP – frontend connections will be accepted only from addresses listed here if the parameter is set

New widgets and visualization improvements

Zabbix 7.4 introduces a new widget (Item card) and multiple visualization improvements for dashboards and network maps.

Item card widget

The new Item card widget behaves similarly to the existing Host card widget introduced in Zabbix 7.2. The Item card widget provides a customizable view of an item and its attributes, such as latest data together with a sparkling chart, error messages, interfaces, tags, triggers, and more. The attributes for display can be selected and ordered in the widget configuration.

Various item attributes can be displayed in the item card widget

Network map improvements

Network maps have also received multiple improvements, enabling new use cases and simplifying existing network map scenarios.

  • Map background images can now be scaled proportionally to the map dimensions
  • Map links now support link indicators based on item value thresholds
  • Map element icons can now be ordered when placed on top of one another
Item value thresholds can be defined for link indicators
  • Map element icons can now be ordered when placed on top of one another
  • Host group map elements will now take into account nested host groups when displaying host group-related information
  • Map link and element labels can now be hidden and only displayed on mouse hover
Map elements can be ordered on top of each other

Dashboard improvements

Zabbix 7.4 introduces multiple dashboard improvements to facilitate faster and smoother dashboard configuration.

The color picker in graph and pie chart widgets has been extended with the new palette color scheme in addition to the existing solid color scheme. Users can choose from the available palette color schemes. The new palette color schemes display the values within a data set in a more distinguishable way, while the existing solid color scheme displays the data set values in shades of the selected color.

The new palette color scheme is available in graph and pie chart widgets

Widget configuration changes are also displayed instantly in Zabbix 7.4 – there’s  no need anymore to apply the changes to see them reflected in the widget.

In addition, the default Global view dashboard has received an overhaul and now utilizes the latest Zabbix widgets to provide additional insights about the Zabbix instance.

The default Global view dashboard has received an overhaul

Other changes in Zabbix 7.4

Multiple smaller fixes have been introduced in Zabbix 7.4, such as new history functions, new macros, security fixes, and more:

  • Preprocessing results can now be copied directly to clipboard by using the “Copy to clipboard” button
  • All users are now allowed to manage their own media by default. These permissions can now be revoked in user role settings
  • A new Notifications section for customizing notification settings has been added under “User Settings”
  • Vault secret macros can now be resolved by either the Zabbix server or Zabbix proxy
  • A new icmppingretry simple check has been added to monitor host responses to ICMP ping with the ability to modify retries
  • New timestamp tracking history functions have been added
  • Multiple new macros added for item-value time tracking
  • Zabbix server/proxy automatically logs history cache diagnostic information when the history cache is full
  • Disabled items are now immediately removed from the history cache
  • It is now possible to manually clear the history cache for a specific item by its id with the history_cache_clear=target runtime command
  • Added support of Gmail OAuth authentication

New templates and integrations in Zabbix 7.4

Many of the existing webhook integrations have been refactored in Zabbix 7.4. The webhooks have been optimized for the best possible performance and include a variety of fixes:

  • Discord
  • GitHub
  • GLPi
  • Jira
  • Jira Service management
  • MS Teams
  • MS Teams Workflows
  • OTRS CE
  • PagerDuty
  • Slack
  • Telegram
  • Zammad
Many of the existing webhook integrations have been refactored in Zabbix 7.4

Multiple new templates have also been introduced:

  • Pure Storage FlashArray
  • Azure SQL Managed Instance
  • Azure MSSQL DTU database by HTTP
  • Azure Backup Jobs by HTTP
  • Palo Alto PA-440
  • Juniper MX
  • Improvements for Dell by HTTP and SNMP templates
Zabbix 7.4 introduces multiple new templates

The post What’s new in Zabbix 7.4 appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Zabbix and a Federal Government Agency

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-and-a-federal-government-agency/30708/

Our Premium Partners at the ATS Group work with a large federal government agency in the United States. They primarily provide storage and compute-as-a-service for the agency, which relies on them to stay up and running at all times.

The challenge

The agency’s primary goal was to simplify their capacity and performance monitoring without extra costs. They had very strict regulatory and SLO oversight requirements that had to be met, especially when it came to capacity and performance.

There was no commercially available software that could accomplish everything they needed directly out of the box, but they still required a solution that was powerful and flexible enough to monitor almost anything.

The solution

Because the agency has several different data centers of different sizes, they use a distributed proxy set up, intense SLA reporting, a ServiceNow integration, a variety of internal integrations, and a monitoring solution provided by Zabbix that includes a predictive alerting setup.

The agency has plenty of software in the mix, but it primarily relies on storage, VMWare, and Kubernetes. They also have multiple satellite offices and data centers, so that in the event of a data center failure, another can come online with minimal downtime in between.

On top of that, they have over 30 metrics and more than a trillion data points across 10 major technologies that they need to measure, primarily from a regulatory perspective. Thousands of granular metrics needed to have solutions and reporting designed for them in Zabbix, including (for example) CPU cores and frequency, processor-to-core usage metrics, and virtualization ratios from hosts to virtual machines.

Their Kubernetes-based Openshift environment also needs to be monitored to exact specifications. Deployment took place via Helm Chart, with Zabbix components being installed as Kubernetes resources, node-level resources, and applications being monitored, while data was aggregated and sent to the Zabbix server.

Metrics are collected via the Kubernetes API and kube-state metrics, and the solution uses Prometheus-exported metrics or direct HTTP endpoint calls. When it comes to configuration, proxies and hosts are created in Zabbix to represent Kubernetes nodes and clusters, while templates and macros are configured to point to the Kubernetes API and kube-state-metrics endpoints.

The results

Thanks to Zabbix, the federal government agency in question has a solution that provides centralized monitoring of Kubernetes alongside other IT resources, supports application-specific metrics without requiring Prometheus endpoints, and offers plenty of flexibility to customize and scale.

In addition, Zabbix’s predictive alerting capabilities identify abnormalities in operational data and predictively alert the agency about anything that could potentially impact an application or service, which lets them meet SLAs, optimize user experience, and increase productivity.

In conclusion

Zabbix’s flexibility and ease of customization make it ideal for customers who need a single source of truth that can be relied on in even the most stringent regulatory environments.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in the public sector, visit us here.

The post Zabbix and a Federal Government Agency appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Zabbix at the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-at-the-netherlands-ministry-of-infrastructure-and-water-management/30681/

The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is the Dutch ministry responsible for transport, aviation, housing policy, public works, spatial planning, land management, and water resource management. Created in 2010 following the merger of the Ministry of Transport and Water Management and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and Environment, the ministry works to create an efficient network of roads, railways, waterways, and airways, effective water management to protect against flooding, and improved air and water quality.

The challenge:

The ministry needed a monitoring solution that could handle not only infrastructure monitoring, but also IoT devices responsible for monitoring water levels, water quality, temperature, and other data. The infrastructure components that needed to be monitored included Red Hat Satellite and Capsule servers, Red Hat Virtual Data Centers, Red Hat Identity management, Ansible automation platforms, and a wide range of custom IoT devices.

The solution:

The Red Hat Satellite and Capsule monitoring consists of one satellite, 6 server, and 15 satellite capsules for different environments, with approximately 2000 Linux machines connected to the satellite capsules. The machines retrieve their packages from the capsules and the capsules act as proxies that fetch data from the satellite servers. The capsules also manage the content packages and subscriptions for the machines.

For Red Hat satellite and Capsule monitoring, Zabbix performs capsule discovery via Low Level Discovery, which uses Http requests, which in turn collect data via the REST API. Each capsule’s content sync status is monitored and if the content sync fails, new packages are not installed. Connectivity between capsules and the satellite is also monitored by performing port checks, because capsules need to be able to connect to the satellite in order for the content to be synced.

Zabbix also discovers and monitors satellite repositories, checking both when the last sync was performed and the current sync status. Software subscriptions are also discovered and monitored and alerts are sent, with the severity of the alerts raised at the point when a subscription has only 30 days remaining.

Red Hat Virtual Data Center licences and identity management also benefit from the added flexibility that Zabbix brings to the table. Virtual DC licences must be present on ESX hosts, so situations where an ESX host with an active license has no VMS on it (or has VMS migrated to it) must be avoided, because that would mean that a license is being essentially wasted. Whenever a Zabbix trigger detects a problem, Ansible automatically attaches or detaches a licence to or from the ESX host, depending on the type of problem detected.

When it comes to Red Hat identity management, Zabbix discovers and monitors processes on the identity management platform (including identity management service status) thanks to the ability to extend Zabbix agent with user parameters.

Meanwhile, Ansible Automation Platform monitoring consists of monitoring for controllers. The Ansible Automation Platform API is used to discover the controllers, and each controller is checked to see if any jobs are running, their last seen time, their capacity, and their status. Sometimes controllers are disabled for maintenance and then re-enabled, so alerts are sent out for controllers that have been disabled for a longer time.

Ansible Automation Platform monitoring also includes monitoring decommission machines, which are assigned to a group instead of being immediately deleted. Zabbix monitors the grace period for the decommission machines and alerts users if the grace period is over, generating a warning if an Ansible host is disabled for seven days and then escalating it if the machine has been disabled for more than 14 days.

Zabbix also discovers and monitors configuration management jobs, and if a job fails it will attempt to restart it. If the issue is still not resolved, it gets escalated to the appropriate individual. These Ansible checks are primarily done via Http agents, from Zabbix servers or proxies.

Finally, in addition to infrastructure monitoring, Zabbix also monitors the health of IoT devices responsible for water levels, water quality, temperature, and other data. These devices are running Raspberry Pi modules and Zabbix Agent 2 is used to monitor the device status. Zabbix Agent 2 with a local agent database is used in cases where the agent is unable to send the metrics on these devices. Should a network outage happen, Zabbix stores the backlog data in the local agent database.

The results:

Trusting their monitoring to Zabbix has greatly improved processes at the ministry, saving time and money by making it easy to notice and fix issues before affected departments themselves were aware of them. In addition, having the latest historical data at their fingertips has been invaluable to the ministry’s technical teams during troubleshooting or when dealing with performance issues, saving everyone involved a great deal of time.

In conclusion

Zabbix’s flexible nature and its ability to integrate with popular platforms as well as custom devices made it the perfect “one-stop shop” for the ministry’s needs, consolidating all of their monitoring in a single pane of glass and giving them complete visibility into every layer of their infrastructure – while also integrating smoothly with their existing systems.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for customers in the public sector, contact us.

The post Zabbix at the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Let Zabbix be your Lucky Lady for Lotto Numbers

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/let-zabbix-be-your-lucky-lady-for-lotto-numbers/30251/

Many years ago, maybe around 2017 or 2018, one of my ex-colleagues (Hi, Kevin!) said that I would probably even use Zabbix to come up with the winning lotto numbers. Just to strike back, I did exactly that with a small “easter egg” in Zabbix containing the lotto numbers – a quick bash script feeding the Zabbix item.

Let’s return to that topic, but use a Zabbix Script item type instead. Also, let’s take a look at few other details that help with monitoring.

Let’s create a host and a new template

To begin with, I created a new template and a new host. Here’s the host, nothing more needed than a name and my fancy template:

The template has only one item:

For the script, here’s what ChatGPT came up with. JavaScript is not my strongest skill, so for a fun little experiment this AI vibe coding should be good enough.

// Generate an array of numbers from 1 to 40
var numbers = [];
for (var i = 1; i <= 40; i++) {
   numbers.push(i);
}

// Shuffle the array using the Fisher-Yates algorithm
for (var i = numbers.length - 1; i > 0; i--) {
   var j = Math.floor(Math.random() * (i + 1));
   var temp = numbers[i];
   numbers[i] = numbers[j];
   numbers[j] = temp;
}

// Select the first 7 numbers from the shuffled array
var lotto = numbers.slice(0, 7);

// Optionally sort the selected numbers
lotto.sort(function(a, b) { return a - b; });

// Return the lottery numbers as a space-separated string
return lotto.join(" ");

So, that’s it! Well, almost – to stop Zabbix from coming up with new numbers all the time, here’s a very nice feature of Zabbix.

Custom intervals

If you set your Update interval to 0, you can use Custom intervals. This way, the new numbers will only be generated once per week every Monday at 8:00 to kick off your work week (assuming that your country has the lotto only once per week, of course).

Naturally, in the actual business world, this kind of exact scheduled monitoring can be extremely helpful as well. If you have something you don’t need to check all the time but only during business days and hours, or only on weekends, or only once per day, this is a handy way of doing it.

Does it work?

You know the answer — of course it does! Now when I search for “lotto”, click on “Latest data” and force the check to happen immediately by clicking on “Execute now”, this happens.

Time to dashboard it

I could peek at the values from Latest data, but that would be boring. With a dashboard, it’s a bit more entertaining…

I hope this post gave you some new ideas or maybe even introduced you to Script item type. If you win some major money with this trick, don’t forget to buy me a coffee!

 

The post Let Zabbix be your Lucky Lady for Lotto Numbers appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Optimizing Incident Management with Zabbix and PagerDuty

Post Syndicated from Zabbix LatAm original https://blog.zabbix.com/optimizing-incident-management-with-zabbix-and-pagerduty/30114/

When monitoring environments, we sometimes need to rely on third-party tools to better manage functionality and optimize responses to alerts. Let’s explore how to integrate Zabbix with PagerDuty, a real-time incident management solution designed to improve the reliability of digital services, including best practices and configuration details.

What is PagerDuty?

PagerDuty is a real-time incident management platform designed to help IT teams react quickly to critical events. The tool helps organizations automate and manage incident response through a system of alerts, escalation, and coordination between teams. When a problem is detected in the system, PagerDuty notifies the responsible individuals and ensures that corrective action is taken quickly. This reduces downtime and improves operational efficiency. Integration with monitoring tools such as Zabbix makes it easy to identify issues before they impact users.

Some of PagerDuty’s key features include:

• Integration with monitoring tools (such as Zabbix)
• Notifications in multiple channels (email, SMS, calls)
• Automatic escalation of incidents to ensure agile responses
• Event analysis to improve the detection of recurring problems

How to integrate PagerDuty with Zabbix

In PagerDuty, go to “Services” and click on “Service Directory.” Create a new service.

Give it a proper name and description.

Accept the escalation terms and click “Next.”

On the next screen, select “Intelligent” and the “Auto-pause incident notifications” option, then click “Next.”

The next step is to add the Zabbix Webhook service, which will allow integration with Zabbix, and then click “Next.”

In Services > Service Directory, select the name of the service. In the “Integrations” tab, copy the integration token that is generated.

It is important to note that the PagerDuty webhook only shows the option of Zabbix versions 5.0 to 5.2, but it works correctly in later versions such as Zabbix 7.2, which was tested without any issues.

On Zabbix Server, go to Alerts > Media types > PagerDuty. Enter the integration token, the Zabbix URL, and select “Update.”

Send a test message to confirm that the integration is working correctly.

In the PagerDuty application, verify that the test alert was received.

To send notifications, you need to grant permissions to a user in Zabbix. Go to Users > Create User. In the “Media” tab, select PagerDuty as the notification method. Set the severity of the alerts you want to receive.

Subsequently, set up a Trigger Action in Alerts > Actions > Trigger Actions to define what types of alerts will be received (either by item or trigger) according to the needs of your team.

Best practices for integrating Zabbix and PagerDuty

• Customize notifications: Set rules to send only truly critical alerts, avoiding unnecessary notifications.
• Optimize escalations: Set up escalation rules so that alerts reach the right people at the right time.
• Monitor key metrics: Measure incident response times and adjust workflows as needed.
• Automate incident responses: Use PagerDuty’s capabilities to perform automated tasks in response to specific events.
• Notify about service failures: Use PagerDuty to start running recovery scripts, send notifications to the responsible teams, or even escalate the problem to a higher level if there is no solution in a stipulated length of time.

Conclusion

Zabbix’s integration with PagerDuty allows you to monitor the status of critical services in real time, even outside of working hours. This facilitates rapid incident response and improves your IT team’s ability to react.

This combination not only optimizes incident management but also helps minimize downtime, improve operational efficiency, and ensure the reliability of monitored systems.

With proper configuration and best practices, integrating Zabbix with PagerDuty can become essential for the proactive management of your technological infrastructure.

 

 

 

 

 

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Build a Culture of Monitoring and Get Buy-In with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/build-a-culture-of-monitoring-and-get-buy-in-with-zabbix/30085/

In today’s fast-paced, interconnected IT world, simply waiting for something to fail before fixing it isn’t good enough. A proactive approach to monitoring, which aims to identify and address potential issues before they escalate into major disruptions, is a necessity rather than a luxury.

Here at Zabbix, we’ve got plenty of reason to believe that we offer the most flexible monitoring solution available on the market today. However, choosing the best monitoring tool for your organization’s needs is only half the battle – you also need to get buy-in from team members who may not understand the need for monitoring, may be fearful of and resistant to change, and may not be familiar with the technologies behind monitoring.

In this post, we’ll take a look at a few strategies you can use to help win over lukewarm or hesitant colleagues and build a culture of monitoring. We’ll also explore how choosing Zabbix for your monitoring needs can make each strategy a bit easier to implement.

Strategy 1: Explain the “why”

One of the first questions that you can anticipate during any change initiative is simply, “what for?” The ethos of “don’t fix what isn’t broken” runs strong in the tech community, and unless you go above and beyond to explain why monitoring matters, your team will remain skeptical.

Zabbix can help you make your case by providing you with the evidence you need to bolster your case. We’ve got plenty of testimonials available from tech communities worldwide (including PeerSpot, Gartner, and Capterra), and no matter what field you’re in or how big your team is, we’ve most likely got a case study or two available that shows how monitoring with Zabbix was a game changer for a company like yours.

All of this should help you explain the rationale for the change in an open and transparent way. When it comes to monitoring, sharing details on costs, expected benefits, and what will happen if no change is made will build understanding around why monitoring is necessary and why monitoring with Zabbix is the right answer for your team’s needs.

Strategy 2: Show your team what’s in it for them

One of the most effective ways to get employee buy-in for monitoring is by highlighting the benefits it will bring to individual employees. Show how monitoring can simplify their tasks, improve efficiency, and enhance their work experience, and give them concrete examples of how the technology can make their jobs easier or help them to deliver better results.

We recently had a large managed services provider (MSP) use our monitoring solution as a true “force multiplier”, allowing them to monitor their systems, automate tasks based on real-time events, and provide immediate responses to issues without manual intervention. Thanks to Zabbix, their engineers report higher job satisfaction thanks to no longer having to be “on call” at all hours to solve simple issues, while management has seen productivity skyrocket thanks to their team’s newfound ability to find potential issues before they become real problems.

Strategy 3: Turn important stakeholders into monitoring champions

Determine who monitoring will impact and who needs to be kept informed. This might be team leaders, IT staff, end users, and/or an executive sponsor. Getting input from these groups early on will help you anticipate needs and concerns, and you’ll also want to identify influential employees who are enthusiastic about monitoring and get them to help you promote it.

A great way to help them do so is by encouraging them to attend one (or more) Zabbix events – we’ve got free meetings, online meetups, regional conferences, or even our yearly Summit in Latvia. No matter where you happen to be located, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll soon be bringing your key people a chance to network with like-minded professionals from multiple industries, expand their knowledge, get answers to their questions, and explore how Zabbix can work for them.

Strategy 4: Provide adequate training

Equipping employees with the skills and knowledge they need to get the most out of a monitoring system means gaining a solid understanding of their current capabilities and then finding out which gaps you most urgently need to fill. Chances are, you’ll need to provide guidance, documentation, hands-on demonstrations, and access to experts – and this is another area where Zabbix has you covered.

Zabbix Certified trainings are designed to help your people learn Zabbix inside and out, giving them the practical knowledge they’ll need to increase their productivity and performance. When you explore our training options, you’ll find a wide variety of courses, everything from one-day sessions that cover the basics to week-long sessions that guarantee users the ability to tackle any Zabbix challenge on their own.

In addition, we’ve got plenty of other free resources available to teams and individuals looking to upskill, including our famously active forum, blog, webinars, and newsletter.

Conclusion

Building a culture of monitoring requires commitment from every level of an organization. By choosing Zabbix as the guide to your monitoring journey and following the strategies outlined in this article, you and your team can successfully implement and maintain a robust monitoring strategy that will help you achieve your organization’s IT goals.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for you, visit our website.

The post Build a Culture of Monitoring and Get Buy-In with Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Monitor Your Wi-Fi Signal Strength with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/monitor-your-wi-fi-signal-strength-with-zabbix/29835/

Can you monitor the signal strength of different Wi-Fi devices that are connected to your (home) router with Zabbix? Of course you can! This is a really quick post that also shows how ChatGPT or any LLM can boost your productivity when doing this kind of thing.

I have an ASUS RT-AX68U router running on Asuswrt-Merlin firmware. On its web interface, it can show you all kinds of details about your network and the devices on it. This is nice, but it would be even nicer to add some of that to Zabbix. One interesting idea for me would be to monitor the signal strength of my Wi-FI devices around the house, so let’s do that and start monitoring RSSI!

What’s RSSI?

Here’s a reply by ChatGPT:

In Wi-Fi (and RF in general), RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) is typically measured in negative dBm values:

• The closer the value is to 0 dBm, the stronger (better) the signal.

• The more negative the value, the weaker the signal.

Broadly speaking, here is a rough guideline:

• -30 dBm: Extremely strong signal (almost too strong – rare in normal conditions).

• -50 dBm: Excellent signal.

• -60 dBm: Very good signal, plenty strong for most uses.

• -70 dBm: Adequate; connectivity is usually reliable but might slow at times.

• -80 dBm: Marginal; still connected but performance may degrade.

• -90 dBm or lower: Very weak; likely to drop connection or have very poor speeds.

Monitoring implementation

If you are a regular reader, you should know by now that I’m not a fan of letting Zabbix agent or any other agent run commands directly for gathering metrics unless I really need the metrics that second. Rather, I’ll use cron jobs or any other background way of creating text files which then will be parsed by Zabbix.

That said, my ASUS now runs a shell script every minute, which then writes a text file /tmp/rssi.txt, which is read by Zabbix agent.

The shell script

Thank you ChatGPT for the following: The script uses wl -i assoclist command to list the connected devices with their MAC addresses and signal strength, and converts those MAC addresses to hostnames to be human-readable.

#!/bin/sh

# Interfaces for 2.4 and 5 GHz (adjust if your router uses different names)
IFACES="eth5 eth6"

LEASES_FILE="/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases"
rm -f /tmp/rssi.txt

echo "Hostname:RSSI" >/tmp/rssi.txt
for iface in $IFACES
do
# List all MACs associated on this interface
for MAC in $(wl -i "$iface" assoclist 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $2}')
do
# Get RSSI
RSSI=$(wl -i "$iface" rssi "$MAC" 2>/dev/null)

# Look up IP and hostname in dnsmasq leases (if present)
# The leases file format is: <epoch> <MAC> <IP> <hostname> <clientid>
IP=$(grep -i "$MAC" "$LEASES_FILE" | awk '{print $3}')
HOSTNAME=$(grep -i "$MAC" "$LEASES_FILE" | awk '{print $4}')

# If the device is static or not found in dnsmasq leases, IP/HOSTNAME might be empty
# so handle that gracefully
[ -z "$IP" ] && IP="Unknown"
[ -z "$HOSTNAME" ] && HOSTNAME="Unknown"

#echo "MAC $MAC:"
#echo " RSSI: $RSSI dBm"
#echo " IP: $IP"
#echo " Hostname: $HOSTNAME"
echo "$HOSTNAME:$RSSI" >>/tmp/rssi.txt
done
done

It outputs this, with self-explanatory results.

Hostname:RSSI
Watch:-43
058743599:-66
Samsung:-62
SonosZP:-45
BroadLink_OEM-T1-89-d3-bb:-57
Kitchen:-52
Mac:-39
iPhone:-40
*:-60
MacBookPro:-43

Adding it to Zabbix

First, I added a new template, for which I then added a new master item reading the /tmp/rssi.txt file.

Because ChatGPT script did make the output in CSV format with : as delimiter, we can use Zabbix item preprocessing to convert that CSV to JSON. The JSON output looks like this.

[{"Hostname":"Watch","RSSI":"-45"},{"Hostname":"058743599","RSSI":"-70"},{"Hostname":"Samsung","RSSI":"-60"},{"Hostname":"SonosZP","RSSI":"-44"},{"Hostname":"BroadLink_OEM-T1-89-d3-bb","RSSI":"-61"},{"Hostname":"Kitchen","RSSI":"-53"},{"Hostname":"Mac","RSSI":"-37"},{"Hostname":"iPhone","RSSI":"-39"},{"Hostname":"*","RSSI":"-56"},{"Hostname":"MacBookPro","RSSI":"-41"}]

With this, we can then use Zabbix low-level discovery to automatically create the items.

Discovery rule

Now that we have our master item, let’s add the discovery rule, which can go through the JSON. The discovery rule uses my previous item as a dependent item, from which it can parse everything in one go.

Discovery item prototype

In item prototype, let’s make it again use the raw list as a dependent item and go from there.

Then in preprocessing, it picks the RSSI value for whatever device LLD was going through by using a JSONPath query…

…or as text:

$[?(@.Hostname=='{#WIFICLIENT}’)].RSSI.first()

That’s pretty much it!

We now have the data coming in once per minute:

Here’s a little dashboard, too. It shows you the traditional bar that’s available on the Top hosts/items widget, and also the new Sparkline that’s on Zabbix 7.2.

Bonus: Location estimation

After a little bit of walking around and observing the devices, I added some value mapping to make Zabbix estimate where the devices would be located. It’s not so useful for static objects, but when I move around with my Apple Watch and iPhone, I could make an attempt to monitor my location at home, too.

After this fine-tuning, my dashboard now looks like this:

Thanks for reading, and have fun conducting your own experiments!

The post Monitor Your Wi-Fi Signal Strength with Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

The ATS Group and a Large MSP

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/the-ats-group-and-a-large-msp/29857/

One of the most critical clients of our Premium Partners at the ATS Group is a large MSP that acts as a service and administration platform for their own clients, providing them with hardware, software, engineers, support staff, metrics, and reporting.

The challenge

The MSP needed a stable, high-performance platform monitoring solution that would cover all the services they provided. They didn’t have the capabilities or budget to run multiple monitoring solutions – a single, flexible solution that could track every service was paramount, as was the ability to react to anomalies before they became serious problems.

After an initial trial with a different monitoring solution that was notable for poor service, a lack of integrations, no community, and almost no documentation, they took a closer look at Zabbix, thanks in large part to our focus on preventative action and automation.

The solution

Because of their focus on performance-based monitoring, the client went with a “hot-cold” architecture and an integration with Ansible EDA, which stands for Event-Driven Ansible. It turned out to be a true “force multiplier”, as using Zabbix, Ansible, and EDA together allowed the MSP to monitor their systems, automate tasks based on real-time events, and provide immediate responses to issues without manual intervention.

The integration was designed to sort issues by whether or not they were able to be automated. If an issue arose that required human intervention, alerts could be sent to ServiceNow via multiple channels. If human intervention was unnecessary, the issue was rerouted to Event-Driven Ansible, which runs automation on all monitored hosts.

For example, with the joint Zabbix/Ansible solution, a slash admin backstage management system filling up at 2AM because of an overflowing log file for some script is no longer an urgent issue. If there are multiple gigabytes of room in the volume group, Zabbix can tell Ansible it’s a problem. Ansible can then increase the file system by 25% and send a message letting the engineers know in the morning that they took action on their behalf.

The results

With essentially no software costs and an automation integration that can find issues and fix them independently, the MSP was able to rapidly achieve a much higher service-to-spend ratio than they’d ever imagined possible.

There has been a noted increase in employee satisfaction as well – thanks to automation, engineers no longer have to be “on call” at all hours to solve simple issues, while C-level executives have seen productivity skyrocket thanks to the joint solution’s ability to find potential issues before they become real problems.

In conclusion

At Zabbix, we work hard to stay on the forefront of automation. That means constantly improving our own product while also staying on top of new technologies like Event-Driven Ansible in order to better integrate with them. To learn more about what Zabbix can do for MSPs, visit us here.

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Building a Monitoring Dashboard: Which Metrics to Track?

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/building-a-monitoring-dashboard-which-metrics-to-track/29777/

A well-designed monitoring dashboard is the key to helping users process, interact with, and analyze data. Done right, it allows key decision-makers to track metrics and gain insights in an organized, easy-to-read format, while giving technical teams complete visibility into IT performance at a single glance. Done wrong, it creates information overload, with too much of everything – too many graphs, colors, widgets, and other sources of information, making it at best deceptive and at worst completely useless.

Obviously, there’s no dashboard big enough to display every possible metric for every possible stakeholder, which is why the key to making a well-organized, informative dashboard that doesn’t confuse the viewer is knowing which metrics to track. By sticking to the absolute “must haves,” you’ll make sure that users can find mission-critical information first. But how should you choose which metrics to track? We’ve put our hard-won dashboard expertise to work and identified four key metric groups that no dashboard should be considered complete without.

Global metrics

System uptime and availability. Availability is one of the most important metrics you can use to determine your network’s performance, because it’s a metric that everyone can see the effects of immediately. For a business, it’s critical when it comes to making sure that the services provided to users are consistently available.

Overall resource utilization (CPU, memory, disk storage, etc.). Think of tracking resource utilization like keeping tabs on your phone’s battery life. You need to track CPU, memory, disk storage, and network usage to keep everything running smoothly. Keeping an eye on those metrics will help you fix small issues before they turn into gigantic problems.

Top critical issues or alerts. Speaking of problems, they can and will happen – and when they do, you’ll naturally want to know about them as soon as possible. An alert can be as simple as a notification of a system update, or it can draw attention to an unusual spike in errors. It could also call attention to a major emergency that demands immediate attention. Either way, no effective dashboard is complete without them.

SLA compliance status. If you’re running a business, monitoring SLA compliance status lets you see service availability and performance, which in turn guarantee customer satisfaction. It allows for quick detection of issues, making proactive management and resolution possible before customers feel any impact.

Infrastructure metrics

Server performance (CPU, RAM, disk I/O). Tracking the response time, central processing unit (CPU) utilization, memory consumption, and network bandwidth of a server helps guarantee a functional user experience. It involves keeping an eye on CPU and RAM utilization, disk I/O (input and output operations involving a physical disk), plus a variety of other sub-metrics.

Application health. Monitoring application health involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about an application’s performance, availability, and behavior. It’s mission-critical because it can help you detect and troubleshoot problems, optimize resource utilization, and provide the application’s users with the quality experience they expect.

Storage usage and trends. Keeping track of storage usage on your dashboard gives you a real-time view of storage metrics as well as predictive analytics (useful for capacity planning) and proactive issue detection, across on-premise and cloud storage environments. Like so many other monitored metrics, its purpose is to maintain optimal storage performance while preventing potential issues before they impact any business operations.

Database performance metrics. Basically, database monitoring is how you measure what you want to improve. It’s what you do before you start performance tuning. Keeping track of your database on your dashboard makes this possible by collecting performance metrics, so that you’re always aware of whether your database can fully support your applications and respond quickly to queries.

Network metrics

Bandwidth utilization and traffic patterns. Bandwidth refers to the maximum data transmission rate on a network at a particular time. Having this metric on your dashboard will let you easily track the amount of bandwidth your network is using and make you immediately aware if you run over the bandwidth threshold.

Latency and packet loss. Latency, or network delay, is a network performance metric that measures the amount of time it takes to transfer data from one destination to another. Consistent delays or unusual spikes in delay time usually mean that you have a major network performance issue. Tracking latency and packet loss on your dashboard will let you know if data transfers are taking too long, while also helping you make sure that any lost data packets get to their destinations.

Interface status and error rates. A network interface can be either networking hardware or a software interface. Monitoring them on your dashboard lets you see each and every network device, and tracking their performance is important when it comes time to identify the root causes of poor performance and network bottlenecks.

Firewall and VPN tunnel status. Monitoring the status of Firewalls and VPN tunnels is important because (among other things) it keeps you aware of whether your VPN tunnel interface is up and available for passing traffic, and whether the destination IP address being monitored is reachable. At the same time, you’ll also have access to real-time information about how your firewall is working, which will keep you aware of any security holes or incorrect settings before they become major problems.

Security metrics

Unauthorized access attempts. Unauthorized access is a big risk to businesses, jeopardizing sensitive data and disrupting operations. You can track attempts by unauthorized users to gain access to any website, server, device, or app by monitoring user activity on your dashboard. This data can also be labeled and sorted so that you can easily interpret it at a glance.

Endpoint security status (AV, patching). Endpoints are basically any devices that connect to networks, including laptops, mobile phones, and IoT devices. The more of them you have, the greater your chances of data loss and cyber threat entry. Monitoring the critical junctures of endpoints on your dashboard will help you identify and prevent threats while making sure that you have quick response measures in place to protect your data and systems.

Compliance and audit logs. Compliance and audit logs are there to make sure errors are noticed and fixed, keep you compliant with regulatory requirements, improve business security, and detect fraud. Monitor them on your dashboard, and you’ll have real-time visibility into your compliance posture as well as immediate alerts when a potential violation is detected.

Active security alerts or anomalies. Continuously keeping an eye on your systems and network lets you detect threats (anything from malware to abnormal activities and unauthorized access) before they escalate and cause real damage. In turn, this helps you maintain user trust, avoid downtime, and comply with data security regulations.

These metrics should give any dashboard a solid foundation that can be easily customized to meet specific business or operational goals.

The Zabbix Advantage

One of Zabbix’s most important features has always been our easily customizable dashboards, which allow users to see and analyze even the most complex monitoring data at a single glance. When it’s time to keep tabs on the essential metrics we identified above, Zabbix dashboards allow anyone (or any infrastructure team) to efficiently monitor network performance, manage resource usage, and guarantee device/application availability.

Zabbix’s graphing and visualization features make it easy to see historical trends and make comparisons. You can choose whatever visualization format is best for a particular set of data, including line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, gauges, and more. Not only that, Zabbix dashboard widgets can communicate with each other, serve as data sources for other widgets, and dynamically update the information they display based on the data source.

To learn more about the flexibility of Zabbix dashboards and see how they can help you track just about any metric imaginable, contact us.

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NIS2 Requirement Support: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/nis2-requirement-support-the-zabbix-advantage/29743/

In order to stay on top of a constantly-evolving cybersecurity landscape, the European Union has made the Network and Information Security (NIS2) Directive the cornerstone of their efforts to guarantee a uniform level of cybersecurity across all member states.

Introduced in 2020 and coming into effect on January 16, 2023, the NIS2 Directive is a continuation and expansion of NIS, the previous EU cybersecurity directive. NIS2 strengthens NIS, expands its scope, and introduces new requirements to help protect vital infrastructure, critical services, and key sectors from cyber threats.

In this post, we’ll go into detail about 8 key NIS2 requirements and see how Zabbix can help organizations meet each one.

NIS2 Requirement 1: Analyze risks and provide information system security.

Zabbix is set up to detect anomalies, suspicious activities, resource overload, downtime, and many other “red flags.” It can also monitor bandwidth usage and network interface metrics, and track the integrity of important files, including password and configuration files.

Monitoring critical services that prevent potential attacks (such as firewalls) is simple and intuitive, as is checking for open ports and insecure webpages. Not only that, Zabbix can track sensors in data centers to detect any physical security breaches and set up a customized alerting workflow for specific events.

NIS2 Requirement 2: Have procedures in place to handle security incidents as they arise.

Zabbix can provide real-time monitoring and alert users to potential incidents, keep a comprehensive log history for root cause analysis, and support multiple notification channels and scenarios for incident reporting. It can also share real-time incident data with external systems (via integrations or APIs) and display custom dashboards and reports about ongoing incidents.

NIS2 Requirement 3: Have backup management, disaster recovery, and crisis management plans in place to provide business continuity.

Zabbix supports Veeam (OOB) and Bacula data platforms, as well as many others. It can also monitor the backup execution process while tracking the storage and usage of backup servers.

NIS2 Requirement 4: Maintain supply chain security, including security-related aspects concerning the relationships between each entity and its direct suppliers or service providers.

Zabbix users can easily monitor third-party services and dependencies (such as APIs or libraries) for availability and performance, while being alerted to any potential vulnerabilities or disruptions in supply chain services. What’s more, Zabbix can also handle service monitoring and SLA reporting, keeping users updated around the clock on progress against predefined SLAs.

NIS2 Requirement 5: Provide security in network and information systems acquisition, development, and maintenance – including vulnerability handling and disclosure.

With Zabbix, a user can easily track software versions and check for outdated components, thanks to Zabbix’s ability to integrate with external tools for checking vulnerabilities.

NIS2 Requirement 6: Have policies and procedures in place regarding the use of cryptography and encryption.

Zabbix makes it simple for organizations of any size to comprehensively monitor encryption certificates for expiration.

NIS2 Requirement 7: Maintain HR security by providing accessible control and asset management policies.

Zabbix allows organizations to quickly and easily monitor user actions via log files.

NIS2 Requirement 8: Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) or continuous authentication solutions, secured voice, video and text communications, and secured emergency communication systems.

Zabbix is set up to monitor the performance and uptime of any identity provider (IdP), using APIs provided by the IdPs themselves to query MFA policies and user login events. Zabbix can also monitor logs for MFA-related events while providing custom dashboards and reports on MFA usage.

In conclusion:

NIS2 is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, and Zabbix has what it takes to equip organizations with the knowledge they need to thrive in this new regulatory environment. Trusting your monitoring to Zabbix can enhance your overall cybersecurity posture and supporting a comprehensive NIS2 implementation strategy.

To learn more, visit our website.

The post NIS2 Requirement Support: The Zabbix Advantage appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Using Frontend Scripts to the Max with Rick van der Ploeg

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/using-frontend-scripts-to-the-max-with-rick-van-der-ploeg/29668/

Zabbix Conference Benelux 2025 is right around the corner, which means that it’s time for another interview with a Conference presenter. This week, we’re talking to Rick van der Ploeg, a Zabbix consultant and expert at Opensource ICT Solutions. We asked him about the road that led him to Zabbix and how frontend scripts can open the door to enhanced Zabbix functionality.

Please tell us a bit about yourself and the journey that led you to Zabbix.

I’m a Zabbix consultant at OICTS. During my time as a DevOps engineer for an MSP, my team was tasked with implementing a monitoring solution for our customers’ network equipment. We successfully integrated Zabbix and never looked back. Since then, I have gained extensive experience with Zabbix, and I recently even became a certified Zabbix Expert.

How long have you been using Zabbix? What kind of Zabbix-related tasks do you take care of on a daily basis?

I’ve been working with Zabbix for over five years now. The first version I used was 4.4, and a lot has changed since then! As a Zabbix consultant, my main role is advising on and implementing Zabbix solutions for our customers. This means anything from building custom templates to installing and managing complete monitoring environments.

Can you drop a couple of hints about what we can expect from your conference presentation?

I’ll be talking about different ways to utilize frontend scripts in Zabbix, and I’ll also showcase some relevant examples of how scripts can enhance Zabbix’s functionality.

How did you decide on the topic of Zabbix and frontend scripts? Was there a specific catalyst or event that led you to this topic?

What I love about frontend scripts is their ability to extend Zabbix’s functionality to almost anything you can think of. Over the years, I’ve developed several solutions that have significantly increased the value and efficiency of the Zabbix installations I’ve worked on.
I’ve noticed that many people are still unaware of the power and possibilities that frontend scripts offer, so I figured this would be a great topic to talk about.

What makes Zabbix especially well-suited for frontend scripts?

For me, the best thing about frontend scripts in Zabbix is that you can use data from Zabbix as input for your scripts. This flexibility allows you to create simple yet powerful scripts that can be easily used by any type of Zabbix user.

The post Using Frontend Scripts to the Max with Rick van der Ploeg appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

The ATS Group and a Regional Telecom Provider

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/the-ats-group-and-a-regional-telecom-provider/29671/

Our Premium Partners at the ATS Group have a regional telecom provider on the West Coast of the United States as one of their key clients. The provider covers a massive geographical area on a limited budget and serves thousands of (primarily rural) customers.

The Challenge

After recent price hikes by the “big-box” monitoring solutions, the provider needed an alternative with a more stable pricing model. Simply put, their budget was shrinking, but their software monitoring costs were expanding.

The provider had a large stock of non-traditional IT equipment that all needed to be monitored effectively, and they also had only one month to get all monitored devices and endpoints over to a new solution.

On top of that, many of the provider’s legacy systems were directly related to regulatory compliance and therefore needed to be operational from day one.

The Solution

The provider set about migrating to a complete and robust Zabbix 7.0 solution that would eliminate any foreseeable issues – even the loss of an entire data center.

There were a few initial hiccups in the implementation when it came to getting PostgreSQL set up with database proxies, but the ATS Group team quickly arrived at an architecture that the provider was happy with. The clear and easy-to-follow Zabbix documentation was of particular help.

The Results

The new Zabbix solution, as implemented, was able to monitor a number of things that had previously been challenging, including:

• Doors. The provider badly needed a solution for monitoring doors, including entrance and exit doors as well as cabinet doors in data centers. They had long-term compliance issues with doors sticking open, employees forgetting to close doors, etc. Zabbix made it easy to develop custom SNMP traps that send alerts in case of open doors, solving the issue.

• Weather. The provider’s services are available over a large and varied geographical area that encompasses multiple states. The ability of Zabbix to predict weather changes across this area has been an important added bonus, with the provider now being able to get future weather alerts that can be used to compare against equipment tolerance levels. Personnel can then be sent to affected areas in anticipation of weather events, instead of being purely reactive.

• SLAs. The provider functions as an ISP that provides internet access to customers in rural areas, many of whom may not have other means of accessing the world around them. As such, they not only feel a strong sense of duty to provide consistent uptime, but they are bound by a strict set of service level agreements (SLAs). With Zabbix, it’s possible to provide SLAs for some of the remote edge equipment involved by building an integration with ServiceNow.

In conclusion

The telecom provider in question trusts Zabbix to guarantee rural broadband access for thousands of customers over an enormous geographic area. Zabbix not only gets the job done more effectively than other monitoring solutions, it does so at a fraction of the cost.

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Feeding Zabbix MQTT Data with Ivo Schooneman

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/feeding-zabbix-mqtt-data-with-ivo-schooneman/29650/

This year’s Zabbix Conference Benelux is rapidly approaching, and to whet our audience’s appetite we sat down for a short interview with one of the conference’s featured presenters. Open Source Consultant Ivo Schooneman works for our Certified Partner Xifeo ICT B.V., and we quizzed him about how he got started in the open-source movement, what led him down the path to Zabbix, and how he sees Zabbix and MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) fitting into a new world of connected and smart devices.

Please tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to this point in your career.

I started using Linux and open-source software in the mid-1990s, building my own home server for email, a website, and a firewall. After my internship in a Linux team, I got a job offer that I accepted. From there I became a consultant, helping small companies to build their servers. Eventually, I moved to a bigger company to offer consultancy services to banks, telecom providers, television stations, and streaming providers.

When you work in a company with a lot of open source enthusiasts, you hear a lot about new products and keep growing to make the environment for your customers better every day. I completed a lot of certifications and training courses – AWS, RHCA, Python, and many more. At some point, I wanted to move on, so I joined Xifeo, where I got the boost I needed to specialize in Zabbix.

How long have you been using Zabbix? What kind of Zabbix-related tasks do you and your team get involved in daily?

I’ve been using Zabbix for about 4 years. When I joined Xifeo in 2022, I took the opportunity to give myself a boost by gaining my Zabbix Certified User, Zabbix Certified Specialist, and Zabbix Certified Professional certifications. I’ve grown to trust it so much that even my home network is monitored with Zabbix!

Can you give us a few clues about what we can expect to hear during your presentation at Zabbix Conference Benelux?

I will talk about the history of MQTT, where it started, how it works with pub/sub, and talk about some scenarios where it could be used – there are always other options. At that point we will take a look at the plugin configuration and see how to split your different subscriptions to multiple topics and servers.

In your experience, does Zabbix lend itself easily to the IoT generally and MQTT data specifically?

I never feel like it’s necessary to have the color of my lights in Zabbix, but the power usage of my appliances, temperatures, particular matter in my rooms, that’s data you can monitor and alert on! MQTT is a great and easy way to do that, as writing API calls for every device would be very time consuming.

What changes do you think MQTT data and the IoT will bring to the world of monitoring over the next decade or so?

With more and more devices capable of measuring different things, we can gather more data than ever before. As the prices of sensors keep dropping, we can measure about anything we want on any place you want. By using a standard protocol, such as MQTT, you will have a uniform way of handling the data. IoT will help us save power and make life easier!

The post Feeding Zabbix MQTT Data with Ivo Schooneman appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Community Story | Daniela, Thetford Library

Post Syndicated from Sophie Ashford original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/community-story-daniela-thetford-library/

We love hearing from members of the community and sharing the stories of amazing young people, volunteers, and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.

Daniela in a Code Club.

When Daniela made the transition from working in retail to joining the team at Thetford Library, she never imagined that she would one day be leading a Code Club. Her manager, who had previously run the club, asked if Daniela would be interested in taking over, and although she was nervous, she was also eager to embrace the challenge and learn new skills.

“At first, I was nervous about teaching coding, but seeing the children’s excitement made me realise it was so important, and I was learning just as much as they were.”

The Code Club was designed to run in eight-week blocks, with a new group of children joining for each term. However, the kids loved it so much that they didn’t want to leave. Daniela, with her growing passion for coding and mentoring, welcomed the children to attend as often as they wanted, with some children, including one particularly enthusiastic young creator, attending every session. This continuity allowed the children to delve deeper into the world of coding, learning in a different way to what they were used to at school.

Inspiring young coders through creativity

One of the key things that Daniela has found resonates most with the children is the combination of creativity and coding. She encourages the kids to draw and plan their projects first, which makes the process more engaging and accessible to all of the young people who want to attend. The freedom to be creative is something that she feels is crucial, especially when compared to the more structured and rigid environment of school curriculums. This approach has been particularly rewarding for one young girl in the club who insists on planning and drawing her own characters and backgrounds for all of her projects.

“Coding isn’t just about writing lines of code — it’s about storytelling, problem solving, and imagining what’s possible.”

Students in a Code Club.

Astro Pi: giving young people the confidence to dream big

Daniela’s journey into coding took a significant leap when she decided to explore the Astro Pi challenge, a project that involves writing code to run on Astro Pi computers aboard the International Space Station. Despite her initial nerves about diving into Python, a more advanced programming language than she had tried at the club previously, she was blown away by the possibilities it opened up. When telling the children, she almost felt that she was more excited at the prospect of them trying out real space science than them. But once she showed them some examples, the buzz was infectious and the sessions ran far smoother than she could have hoped. Daniela’s tip for trying Astro Pi for the first time? Find a fellow mentor to help you along the way and dream big.

“I never imagined we’d be working on space science at our library. Introducing children to coding early isn’t just about technology; it’s about giving them the confidence to dream big and think differently.”

Thetford Library

The success of the Code Club at Thetford Library is part of a broader initiative by Norfolk Libraries to provide digital skills to the community. They are committed to offering resources and opportunities for people of all ages to engage with technology. From their Digital Week, which focuses on improving digital literacy, to offering mentorship for adults learning to navigate the digital world, Norfolk Libraries is working hard to bridge the digital divide.

Benefits of volunteering at a Code Club 

For Daniela, the importance of introducing children to coding at an early age is not something she thought would become a passion for her when moving careers. She sees firsthand how these skills empower the children, giving them confidence and opening up future career opportunities. 

“Code Club has shown me that stepping outside your comfort zone is where the real growth happens. Both for me and the kids!”

A mentor is helping a student in class.

It’s this combination of creativity, learning, and the sheer joy of discovery that keeps Daniela passionate about running the Code Club, and why she continues to welcome every eager child who walks through the door.

Inspire young people in your community

If you are interested in encouraging your child to explore coding, take a look at the free coding project resources we have available to support you. If you would like to set up a Code Club for young people in your community, or attend one, head to codeclub.org for information and support.

The post Community Story | Daniela, Thetford Library appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Migration to Zabbix 7.0

Post Syndicated from Rogerio Batista original https://blog.zabbix.com/migration-to-zabbix-7-0/29594/

Based in northern Brazil, TO HOST Data Centers provides regional cloud services with a focus on cloud computing, colocation, and infrastructure management. With 35 suppliers and partners and over 5,000 monitored assets, their mission is to provide innovative IT infrastructure products and services with a high level of proficiency, in order to meet the high standards required by their clients and partners. To do this, they need to monitor internal applications, data center assets, devices, and customer environments, ensuring high availability and optimal performance.

The challenge:

TO HOST’s monitoring environment included a standalone server (Zabbix, FrontEnd, Database) with the following:

  • Hosts: ~600
  • Itens/Metrics: ~90.000
  • Average period for history table: 45~60 days
  • Average period for trends table: 365 days
  • Average period for events table: 365 days
  • 3 Internal Proxies
  • 8 Client Proxies
  • ~30 External Active Agents

TO HOST needed a clean installation of Zabbix Server and Zabbix Proxy version 7.0.x on separate virtual machines with an updated operating system (Oracle 9), plus a migration of the current monitoring environment database to the new version, while preserving history and data integrity.

Their production servers were outdated, featuring a CentOS 7 version that was originally installed with Zabbix version 5.2.x and updated to version 6.0.x in 2022. The migration needed to retain historical data and ensure compatibility with Zabbix 7.0.x, while keeping service interruptions to a minimum.

A number of risks were anticipated and planned for – during the data migration process, it was understood that there may be failures in migrating the database due to version incompatibility and that there was a distinct possibility of collection failures that would require corrections after migration, if any data sources were not properly mapped.

All graphs needed to be reviewed and optimized to take advantage of the new widget models and improvements in Zabbix 7.0. Due to the changes in data sources (and because of the migration to a new operating system and a new version of the Zabbix Server) there was potential version incompatibility.

Directories containing custom scripts and images were mapped and files were copied in order to ensure integrity, and the TO HOST team was prepared for possible service interruptions during the upgrade process, standing ready to notify users about the planned maintenance and creating procedures to minimize the impact.

The solution:

Step one was to make sure that the change to Zabbix 7.0 was appropriately planned. A change schedule was created, and all relevant stakeholders were notified of the operation. A virtualized environment was then set up on Oracle 9, in order to guarantee a clean installation.

Once that was done, Zabbix 7.0 was installed, keeping in mind that the imported database could not exist on the new server. Next up was a full backup and the cloning of the database for integrity validation pre-migration. At this point, the To Host team stopped the data collection service, started the backup, and started restore.

From that point, it became a simple matter of carrying out automated database versioning and data source mapping corrections. The data mapping during the Zabbix 7.0 migration involved updating the database structure to meet the new version’s requirements, such as changes to MySQL instances, fields, and storage formats.

Data mapping in the Zabbix migration process involved the following:

  • Database Version: During migration, the database structure changed to align with the requirements of Zabbix 7.0. This included different versioning of MySQL instances, as well as modifications to fields, tables, and storage formats within the database.
  • Import and Update Process: The legacy database (version 6) was exported and then imported into the new Zabbix 7.0 installation. During the process, Zabbix ran automatic update scripts to convert the old database into the new format.
  • Data Sources: Each item monitored in Zabbix was associated with a unique key (item key) that defined how data was collected and processed. No changes were identified in this process.
  • Tools and Validations: Mapping validation was performed during the import/restore process, where error logs indicated inconsistencies. During testing, inconsistencies were found in the validation, requiring a command to update the keys replicated on the migration.

Data collection services were then restarted, and all stakeholders were notified of the completion of the change.

The results:

Zabbix 7.0’s new dashboards and improved visual configuration have increased the satisfaction of internal customers, while having a tangible impact on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

The implementation and management of Zabbix 7.0 has enhanced the continuous visibility and integrity of TO HOST’s IT systems, enabling real-time monitoring and alerting, facilitating proactive issue resolution, and guaranteeing optimal infrastructure performance.

Many users have noted that the asynchronous polling method used in Zabbix 7.0 significantly reduces the time taken for metric collection. This allows for faster incident detection and resolution in TO HOST’s critical environment, while the addition of multi-factor authentication and improved access controls has helped to enhance security in monitoring environments and keep cyber threats at bay.

TO HOST’s future plans include exploring advanced Zabbix 7.0 features and continuous performance monitoring. A roadmap is already in place to leverage the additional automation and security enhancements that Zabbix 7.0 can provide.

The post Migration to Zabbix 7.0 appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Change is the Only Constant: 2024 in Review

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/change-is-the-only-constant-2024-in-review/29528/

Time waits for no one, and as impossible as it may seem, one of the most consequential years in the history of Zabbix is already in the books. You can be forgiven for feeling at times like we were trying to cram a decade of events into a single year, which is why we’ve prepared this handy look back at the highlights of 2024 – just in case there’s anything you were too busy to notice as it happened!

Re-imagining the product

One of the year’s unquestioned highlights was the long-awaited release of Zabbix Cloud on October 1. As our first new product release since the creation of Zabbix, Zabbix Cloud is designed to provide the Zabbix features our community members know and love, but with easier deployment and management as well as automatic upgrades and easier scalability.

To celebrate the release itself, we held a release party at our Riga HQ with members of our global community who were in town for Zabbix Summit 2024, which kicked off a few days later. The release definitely got our community talking – the level of interest in this new “portable” version of Zabbix exceeded even our highest expectations.

Our team also released Zabbix 7.0 LTS on June 4, packed full of improvements and upgrades that our users have been asking for, including upgraded performance and scalability, new ways to visualize data, faster network discovery speed, and more. We followed that in December with the release of Zabbix 7.2, which added improved monitoring features and workflows as well as a host of new templates.

It can’t be stressed enough – all these new products, innovations, and updates were the result of feedback and suggestions from our global community. We listen, we learn, and we take your ideas to heart!

Security first

In 2024, Zabbix transitioned to the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, with an extended scope to cover Zabbix Cloud. This milestone also includes compliance with ISO/IEC 27017:2015, further enhancing cloud-specific security controls.

Meanwhile, the HackerOne bug bounty program continues to be a success. 2024 brought us 33 valid submissions, and we paid $35,000 in bounties. Out of those, we have already fixed and published 24 vulnerabilities for source code.

The Zabbix CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) program and processes are also continuing to mature. Recently, an audit was performed against our organization’s CVE submission for 40 submissions in the NIST NVD (National Vulnerability Database). Not only did we pass the audit and gain contributor status, but Zabbix is currently the only CVE Numbering Authorities (CNA) in Latvia.

Making our presence felt

Our community members piled up the frequent flier miles as we traveled the globe to keep in touch with our ever-expanding community and win over new converts. The events we took part in this year included the following:

• 31 meetings (with first-time visits to many destinations in North America)
• 1 forum in Mexico City
• 18 meetups (both online and in a variety of global locations)
• 4 conferences (Benelux, China, Japan, and Latin America)
• Far too many exhibitions, trade fairs, and expos to list conveniently
• One extremely successful Zabbix Summit in Riga

“The long hours and even longer flights really paid off, as this year was our most successful yet in terms of new business. The events we held in North America were especially helpful in terms of breaking new ground. We understood that we have an amazing Zabbix community in the United States and a much bigger market to work with.” – Ronalds Sulcs, Zabbix Head of Sales

A year of continuous growth

2024 saw us add new team members in every location we operate in, while also recruiting remote workers from nearly every corner of the globe. All told, the team grew by 30 people, which means we are now almost 200 strong! Meanwhile, the Partners team was also operating at full throttle, adding 12 new highly-skilled Certified Partners and 16 Resellers in locations from Australia to Morocco. All partners and resellers were chosen for their unique blend of experience and expertise, and we’re confident that they’ll provide best-in-class knowledge where it’s needed most.

The fact that we’ve managed to build on our status as an employer of choice across three continents while adding an ever-increasing number of quality partners in every corner of the globe speaks to the hard work and competence of our colleagues as well as the quality of the products and services we provide. Congratulations to everyone who did their part to make sure we continue to add talent and expertise!

Giving back

2024 was an exceptionally successful year in terms of bringing our products and services to the world, but we’re proud of the fact that we also managed to export our values of openness, transparency, and a desire to give back to the communities we live and work in. This took multiple forms throughout the year:

• The LatAm team worked with the DEDICA Foundation – Foundation for Digital Development and Open Knowledge to create the Zabbix Innova Challenge. The challenge is designed to encourage creativity and stimulate technological development in local communities through a Hackathon and other activities, with the goal of introducing Zabbix to a new generation of tech talent.
• In December, we made a generous donation to Pārtikas banka “Paēdušai Latvijai” (Food Bank “For a Full Latvia”) in support of their mission of getting nutritious food to communities in need. We also gave to support Bērnu slimnīcas fonds, Latvijas Bērnu fonds, Autisma atbalsta punkts, and Ziedot.lv – all with the goal of supporting children’s health, while our employees in the Riga office prepared gifts for senior citizens at the Rīga Social Care Center Mežciems as part of the “Eņģeļa pasts (Angel’s Mail)” charity project, Santa’s Workshop.
• The end of the year also saw us contribute €50,000 to Dod pieci!, the Latvian charity marathon organized by Latvijas Radio, Latvijas Televīzija, LSM.lv, and Ziedot.lv. The marathon helps make life-saving cancer treatment more affordable.

It’s been our experience that making a difference and donating to good causes reinforces a shared commitment to the company as well as to each other. We’d like to thank and congratulate everyone who took part in our outreach efforts over the past year!

Getting noticed

The news about what we got up to in 2024 seemed to be everywhere, as tech journals, newspapers, and global organizations showered us with positive publicity. At Interop Tokyo 2024, the Zabbix Japan team picked up the prestigious “Best of Show” Grand Prize in the Management and Monitoring category for the Zabbix 7.0 LTS release. The award is granted by a jury made up of some of the world’s most knowledgeable IT and monitoring experts, so recognition was truly an honor.

In Latin America, Milenio published a profile of our CEO and Founder Alexei Vladishev that brought the Zabbix story to thousands of new readers, while Mexico’s Encuentro Vidal marked the occasion of Zabbix Conference Mexico in November with a look at how Zabbix is helping countries in the region on their journey to digital transformation.

Globo published a well-written and informative piece that explored how the Brazilian city of Extrema has been investing in new technologies (with Zabbix prominent among them) in order to better serve the population of the city and make its administration more efficient and transparent.

Carrying our momentum into 2025

As 2025 gets underway, remember to stay on top of Zabbix news by following us on social media, reading our blog, and checking our forum.

“2024 was an eventful year that was full of excitement, growth, and change. It was the year we made Zabbix Cloud a reality, and a true milestone in the growth of our company and our community. I’m sure that everyone in the Zabbix family is excited to see what our 20th Anniversary year of 2025 will bring!” – Alexei Vladishev, Zabbix Founder and CEO

 

The post Change is the Only Constant: 2024 in Review appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Solving Log Monitoring Challenges at SEB Bank

Post Syndicated from Giedrius Stasiulionis original https://blog.zabbix.com/solving-log-monitoring-challenges-at-seb-bank/29153/

SEB Bank is a major financial services group based in Stockholm, Sweden. It serves northern Europe, particularly the Nordic and Baltic regions. Known for its digital innovation and commitment to sustainability, SEB offers banking, investment, and financial advisory services to individuals, businesses, and institutions, focusing on long-term relationships and financial stability. This case study, which shows how Zabbix helped SEB solve its log monitoring challenges, discusses aspects specific to SEB’s operations in the Baltics, where distinct systems and structures are in place but are aligned with the group’s overall approach.

The challenge

Between 2016 and 2020, SEB launched a unified IT platform for all three Baltic countries. They encountered a wide variety of challenges, including a distinct need to unify the monitoring area. Different countries had different tools and different attitudes regarding the way monitoring should operate. After numerous discussions and weighing the pros and cons of different monitoring tools, SEB concluded that the most effective way to achieve unification would be to (re)implement everything necessary with Zabbix.

It turned out that a great deal of valuable data for monitoring resides in logs. The logs varied in update frequency and structure, as did the requirements for data extraction. Some monitoring items were simple regex patterns to count matching entities or catch errors, while others had more complex logic, such as joining multiple lines for evaluation or dynamically detecting specific patterns to observe.

At the start of SEB’s journey with Zabbix, they were using version 3.0, which came with some now long-forgotten limitations:

  • No log.count[*] item yet
  • No PCRE regular expressions – only ERE was available
  • Very limited dashboard and visualization capabilities

The solution

To address all the log-related challenges, SEB chose to leverage Zabbix’s “UserParameter” capabilities. This feature is invaluable for extending Zabbix functionality.

log.discovery

This custom approach relies on the ability to effectively convert regex capturing groups into LLD (Low-Level Discovery) objects. When new elements that need monitoring appear in the logs, corresponding monitoring objects can be automatically created in Zabbix. This process was covered in more detail at Zabbix Summit 2023.

For instance, an effective set of metrics is extracted from logs to monitor the SEB mobile app. Request processing durations are logged alongside other parameters, enabling efficient grouping, such as by endpoint name and HTTP status code. This approach accommodates a wide range of potential combinations for “endpoint + HTTP status code”:

[root@linux ~]# ./log_discovery.sh "${my_log}" 1000000 COMPONENT "response\":.\"status\":(\d{3}).*uriPattern\":\"([^ ]+)\",.timing" | jq '.' | grep -c COMPONENT_1
205
[root@linux ~]#

LLD is able to gather them all:

For each discovered couple, monitoring of request processing durations is added, both for individual durations and 1 minute averages:

Certain significant combinations are enhanced with triggers, efficiently managed using the “Override” section in the LLD configuration to ensure they are created only for specific cases. So with this approach, some unexpected slowness can be nicely caught:

log.reader

For complex data collection scenarios, there was a need to implement a solution that allows data to be extracted from logs with minimal limitations. The approach was to create a log reading mechanism that could support any required data extraction logic on top of it. This was covered in more detail at Zabbix Summit 2024.

Zabbix agent 2

In addition to the mentioned custom log processing techniques, SEB had a good reason to use “Zabbix agent 2”. Both log[*] and log.count[*] are of the “Active” item type. These items are not processed in parallel by the Zabbix agent. In places with a large number of log-based items, “Zabbix Agent 2” was used, because it supports the concurrent processing of active checks.

The results

The ability to use LLD on logs was a game-changer and a lifesaver for SEB. Imagine hundreds of different items discovered from a single rule, along with the requirement to monitor any new entity matching a specific pattern as soon as it appears. Without LLD, meeting such a requirement would have been simply impossible. This approach covers many different areas, including mission-critical metrics such as counts of various requests and processing durations.

The ability to slice logs themselves and create any needed logic on top makes almost any custom log monitoring requirement possible. It gives the ability to analyze data in ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise (e.g. average duration monitoring for large set of data).

In conclusion

SEB Bank in the Baltics relies heavily on data collection from logs. Zabbix is flexible enough to meet most of their needs when it comes to log monitoring, and – most importantly – it allows for custom implementations where required. This flexibility is highly appreciated, as it removes many barriers when monitoring the various components of SEB’s IT ecosystem and business functions.

The post Solving Log Monitoring Challenges at SEB Bank appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

NetBox as Home CMDB and Integrated with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/netbox-as-home-cmdb-and-integrated-with-zabbix/29324/

Welcome to another episode of What’s up, home? weirdness! Who wouldn’t have their own NetBox at home – and who wouldn’t think of it as a  home CMDB? I’ve just started experimenting with it. For those who do not know, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is the source of truth for your inventory of stuff. In data centers, it keeps track of your servers, their cables, and everything else, telling you in which data center and which rack they are.

For me… well, take a look at for yourself. One picture says more than a thousand words of my storytelling.

What is it good for?

Well… in the real business world, it’s good for many things – from knowing about your assets, their serial numbers, purchase dates, hardware configuration, and so much else. I could go as deep as that, but there’s a limit how far even I want to go with these little experiments. Today’s case is merely to demonstrate the flexibility of Zabbix, yet again.

How did I do this?

I quickly threw the data in to NetBox by hand — it looks by a lot of work to do, but in fact, it wasn’t too bad – took me about 45 minutes to do the following:

  • Create a Site called “”What’s up, home?”
  • Create the rooms by adding new locations and making the previously created site as their parent
  • Add some manufacturers
  • Add some device roles
  • Add some device types

After that, adding the devices themselves is a breeze. If you have not used NetBox, this is what adding a new device looks like. Yes yes, in the real business world there would have been many more items for me to fill in, but for this case I only added the mandatory items and even those I could do just by choosing from the drop-down menus. Not a big deal.

…and the Zabbix integration?

Actually, this is something I created many years ago for other purposes, but still seems to work with today’s versions of NetBox. My little template queries NetBox over its API and asks if it has anything that matches with the host name that’s in Zabbix. If it has, then it gets the rack location and other stuff.

How this then works is pretty standard stuff. Retrieve a master item…

…and the dependent items then gather the data, parse some JSONPaths with Zabbix item preprocessing, and at least some of the items also populate bits and pieces in the Zabbix inventory. This is handy in real world, as your alerts can then contain the exact rack location and so forth about your failing devices. Add them as tags or add them as part of the alert text, your imagination is your limit.

Does it work?

Of course it does! Here’s the inventory grouped by manufacturer:

If I click on any of them, I get this:

Of course I can also browse the data through the latest data, for example…

…or I could just create some dashboards for visualizing all this. I have not done that yet, as this is what I did tonight so far and now I’m going to bed. To be continued – maybe! For now, the template only pulls data from NetBox, but I’d like to push data towards it as well, to also tell if a light bulb is powered on or not, for example. Stay tuned!

 

 

The post NetBox as Home CMDB and Integrated with Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix Plays Rock-Paper-Scissors

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-zabbix-plays-rock-paper-scissors/29310/

Zabbix 7.0 is so fast that in a small environment such as What’s up, home? it gets bored. Very bored.

What does Zabbix do when it gets bored? It uses its new Selenium-based Browser item type and plays some Rock-Paper-Scissors against this blog site.

But how does that work?

The idea is simple. My website hosts a very simple PHP script which returns back a random value of “Rock”, “Paper” or “Scissors”. Likewise, my Zabbix Selenium test picks up a random word out of those. Then, the Selenium test checks both answers and gets back the result.

So, in all seriousness, this blog post demonstrates you how the new Browser item type can react to different responses.

Backend code

Here’s the PHP script in all its g(l)ory:

<html>

<head>

<title>Whatsuphome.fi :: rock-paper-scissors</title>

</head>

<body>

<p>

<?php

$choices = ["Rock", "Scissors", "Paper"];

$random_choice = $choices[array_rand($choices)];

echo $random_choice;

?>

</p>

</body>

</html>

Nothing to call home about in that script: array with three choices, pick a random choice, print the result, done.

Zabbix side

I created a new Browser type item like this:

… and here’s the script part I just hammered in, so there might or might not be bugs. I really did not test this very thoroughly.

var browser = new Browser(Browser.chromeOptions());

const moves = ["Rock", "Scissors", "Paper"];

const zabbixMove = moves[Math.floor(Math.random() * moves.length)];

try {

browser.navigate("https://whatsuphome.fi/rps.php");

var opponentMove = browser.findElement("xpath", "//p").getText();

if (zabbixMove === opponentMove) {

var winner = "Draw";

}

else if (

(zabbixMove === "Rock" && opponentMove === "Scissors") ||

(zabbixMove === "Scissors" && opponentMove === "Paper") ||

(zabbixMove === "Paper" && opponentMove === "Rock")

) {

var winner="Zabbix";

}

else {

var winner="Opponent";

}

}

finally {

return ("Winner is " + winner + ". Zabbix move was " + zabbixMove + " and opponent move was " + opponentMove);

}

That’s it! From now on my Zabbix will play the game once per hour, although for this blog post I did manually click the Execute now button a few times. Again, here’s the same screenshot that was also in the beginning of this blog post.

Happy gaming!

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