Tag Archives: Handy Tips

Handy Tips #15: Deploying Zabbix passive and active agents

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/handy-tips-15-deploying-zabbix-passive-and-active-agents/17696/

Deploy Zabbix Agent to collect OS-level metrics.

There are multiple approaches to collecting OS-level metrics – from collecting only simple ping statistics to deploying an SNMP agent or using custom scripts. In many cases, this is either not sufficient or too time-consuming and not flexible enough. By deploying the Zabbix Agent you can enable a quick and easy way to collect OS-level metrics.

Deploy Zabbix Agent and collect metrics by polling the agent or autonomously sending data to your Zabbix Server:

  • Zabbix Agent supports polling (passive) and trapping (active)
  • Negligible performance overhead
  • Can be installed from packages on Linux or the MSI installer on Windows

  • Supports the most popular Unix-like operating systems
  • Zabbix Agent can be extended with custom User Parameters

Check out the video to learn how to deploy the Zabbix Agent in passive and active modes

How to configure and deploy Zabbix passive and active agents:

  1. Install the Zabbix repository and the Zabbix Agent on your host
  2. Open the zabbix_agentd.conf configuration file
  3. Specify your Zabbix Server address in the Server and ServerActive parameters
  4. Define the name of your host in the Hostname parameter
  5. Restart the Zabbix Agent
  6. Navigate to Configuration →  Hosts
  7. Create two hosts in Zabbix frontend – one for passive and one for active checks
  8. For passive Agent host – define an Agent interface containing the address of your Zabbix Server
  9. The active agent Host name should match the Hostname parameter value in the Agent configuration file
  10. Apply the corresponding Linux by Zabbix Agent/Linux by Zabbix Agent active template
  11. Navigate to Monitoring →  Latest data and check if you have received metrics from the hosts

Tips and best practices:
  • A single Zabbix Agent can collect metrics in both passive and active modes
  • Zabbix Agent is backward compatible
  • The frontend ZBX interface icon is related only to passive checks 
  • Active Zabbix Agent doesn’t require an interface configuration in Zabbix frontend
  • For active checks, the Zabbix Agent Hostname in the configuration file must match the Host name in the frontend

Handy Tips #14: Gain new insights into your metrics with the Graph widget

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/handy-tips-13-gain-new-insights-into-your-metrics-with-the-graph-widget/17416/

Group, aggregate, and visualize your collected metrics with the Graph widget to obtain additional insights.

Sometimes simple graphs may not be sufficient – we may need to visualize data trends, display all metrics matching a pattern, or define custom draw styles for specific metrics.

The Graph widget allows you to visualize your metrics in an advanced fashion:

  • Customize your graph draw styles
  • Select between displaying History or Trend values
  • Calculate and display aggregated metric values on the fly

  • Define custom aggregation intervals
  • Define flexible problem display logic
  • Visually group metrics by defining item and host data sets

Check out the video to learn how to visualize your metrics by using the Graph widget.

How to visualize data with the Graph widget:

  1. Navigate to Monitoring → Dashboards – All Dashboards
  2. Click Create Dashboard to create a new Dashboard
  3. Left-click on an empty space and select Add Widget
  4. Select Widget type – Graph
  5. Type in the data set host and item patterns
  6. Use wildcard symbol ‘*‘ to match multiple hosts/items
  7. Click Add new data set to add a second data set
  8. Fill in the host pattern and item pattern to match a different set of metrics
  9. For both data sets, select an Aggregation function, Aggregation interval, and Aggregate – Data set
  10. Observe how metrics get aggregated in the graph on the fly

Tips and best practices:
  • Wildcards can be used in host and item pattern matching
  • The Overrides section can be used to further customize a particular set of items
  • Items within a single data set will use the same base color
  • Up to 50 items may be displayed in the graph

Handy Tips #13: Automate inventory information collection with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/handy-tips-13-automate-inventory-information-collection-with-zabbix/17367/

Metrics collected by Zabbix can be used not only for historic data analysis and problem detection but they can also be utilized to populate your host inventory.

Keeping track of your host inventory is a necessity in organizations of every size. Using another tool to do that can be costly and cause software bloat and sometimes we may have to resort to populating inventory data manually.

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Handy Tips #12: Optimizing Zabbix database size with custom data storage periods

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/handy-tips-12-optimizing-zabbix-database-size-with-custom-data-storage-periods/17396/

Zabbix allows its users to configure custom data retention periods for different types of data – from history and trend storage periods to user session storage periods.

Data retention requirements can vary a lot between different environments. With considerations to data storage footprint and company policies, some environments might require storing months of historical data, while others are fine with storing mostly trends.

Use housekeeping settings to define custom data storage periods:

  • Storage periods can be defined for history, trends, events, and more
  • Unique storage periods can be defined for each individual item

  • TimescaleDB backends support native data partitioning and compression
  • Housekeeping for individual data types can be disabled – not recommended in production environments

Check out the video to learn how to define data storage periods on your Zabbix instance.

How to define data storage periods on your Zabbix instance:

  1. Navigate to Configuration → Hosts and click on the Items button next to an existing host
  2. Select any integer or float item
  3. Set the History storage period to 30d, Trend storage period to 180d
  4. Save the item
  5. Navigate to Administration → General → Housekeeping
  6. Set the Trigger data storage period to 90d
  7. Tick the checkbox next to the Override item history period option
  8. Set the History storage period to 90d
  9. Navigate back to Configuration → Hosts and click on your host
  10. Click on the Items next to your host and find the previously modified item
  11. Click on the green i next to the History storage period
  12. Read the override notification

Tips and best practices::
  • Usually, long term storage of internal, network discovery, and autoregistration events is not required
  • Item and trend storage periods can be overridden by global settings
  • Storage period will not be overridden for items that have Do not keep history or Do not keep trends enabled
  • An event will not be removed until the associated problem is resolved

Handy Tips #11: Collect and send custom metrics with Zabbix sender

Post Syndicated from vitalijsm original https://blog.zabbix.com/handy-tips-11-collect-and-send-custom-metrics-with-zabbix-sender/17452/

Collect custom metrics from your in-house applications and forward them to your Zabbix instance by utilizing the Zabbix sender command-line tool.

As you scale up our monitoring, you will inevitably encounter a situation where a particular metric can be quite complex to collect with native monitoring techniques.

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