Tag Archives: Zabbix

Enhancing Network Synergy: rConfig’s Native Integration with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Stephen Stack original https://blog.zabbix.com/enhancing-network-synergy-rconfigs-native-integration-with-zabbix/28283/

Native integration between two leading open-source tools – Zabbix for network monitoring and rConfig for configuration management, delivers substantial benefits to organizations. On one side, Zabbix offers a platform that maintains a Single Source of Truth for network device inventories. It provides real-time monitoring, problem detection, alerting, and other critical features that are essential for day-to-day operations, ensuring smooth and reliable network connectivity crucial for business continuity.

On the other side, there’s rConfig, renowned for its robust and reliable network automation, configuration backup, and compliance management. Integrating rConfig with Zabbix enhances its capabilities, allowing for seamless Device Inventory synchronization. This union not only simplifies the management of network configurations but also introduces more advanced Network Automation Platform features. Together, they form a powerhouse toolset that streamlines network management tasks, reduces operational overhead, and boosts overall network performance, making it easier for businesses to focus on growth and innovation without being hindered by network reliability concerns.

Optimizing Network Management with Unified Inventory

At rConfig, we are deeply embedded with our customers, and our main mission is to work with them to solve their real-world problems. One significant challenge that consistently surfaces – both from client feedback and our own experiences – is managing and accurately locating a trusted and reliable central network inventory. This challenge brings to the forefront a classic dilemma in Enterprise Architecture circles: In our scenario of network inventory, which system ought to act as the System of Record, and which should function as the System of Engagement to optimize interactions with records for various purposes, such as Network Management Systems (NMS) and Network Configuration Management (NCM)?

Enterprise Architecture circles illustrating systems of record, insight and engagement. Credit: Sharon Moore - https://samoore.me/
Enterprise Architecture circles illustrating systems of record, insight and engagement. Credit: Sharon Moore – https://samoore.me/

At rConfig, from a product perspective we’ve chosen to focus on what we do best and love most: Network Configuration Management. Therefore, integrating with an upstream Network Management System (NMS) that can act as the System of Record for network device inventory was a logical step for us. Given that many of our customers also use Zabbix network operations, it was a natural choice to begin our integration journey with them. Our platforms are highly complementary, which streamlines the integration process and enhances our ability to serve our customers better. This strategic decision allows us to offer a seamless and efficient management solution that not only meets the current needs but also scales to address future challenges in network management.

Enhanced Integration Through ETL

You might be wondering how this integration works and whether it’s straightforward or challenging to set up. Setting up the integration between rConfig and Zabbix is relatively straightforward, but, as with any complex data driven systems, it requires careful planning and diligence to ensure that the data flow between the systems is fully optimized and automated. This is where ETL – or Extract, Transform, Load – plays a crucial role. ETL is a process that involves extracting data from the Zabbix API in its raw form, transforming it into a format that rConfig can readily process and validate, and then loading it into the rConfig production database. This process also efficiently handles any data conflicts and updates.

The advantages of using ETL are significant, enhancing data quality and making the data more accessible, thereby enabling rConfig to analyze information more effectively and make well-informed, data-driven decisions. At rConfig, our user interface is designed to aid in the development and troubleshooting of features, though we’re also fond of using the CLI for those who prefer it. Below is a screenshot from our lab showing the end-to-end ETL process with Zabbix in action. It illustrates the steps rConfig takes to connect to Zabbix, extract, validate, transform and map the data, load it to staging, and finally, move it to the production environment for a small set of devices.

While the screenshot below displays just a few devices as a sample integration in our lab, the most extensive integration we’ve achieved in a production environment with this new rConfig feature involved syncing a single Zabbix instance with over 5,000 host/device records. This highlights its efficiency and reliability in a real-world environment.

Screenshot of rConfig Zabbix Integration on the Command Line
Screenshot of rConfig Zabbix Integration on the Command Line

Going Deeper: Understanding the Integration Process

To grasp the integration process more clearly, let’s dive into the details that will help you understand how to set everything up before we automate the task. Our documentation website, docs.rconfig.com, provides comprehensive details, and our YouTube channel features a great demonstration video of the entire process.

Initial Setup: The first step involves configuring rConfig to connect and authenticate with the Zabbix API. This setup is managed through the Configuration page in the rConfig user interface. During this phase, you can also apply filters to select specific Zabbix tags or host groups, refining exactly which host records you want to synchronize.

Screenshot of Zabbix Configuration page in rConfig V7 professional
Screenshot of Zabbix Configuration page in rConfig V7 professional

Data Extraction and Validation: Once the connection is established, rConfig extracts host records in raw JSON format. This stage involves validating the data to ensure that the correct tags and data mappings are in place.

Screenshot of Zabbix Raw Host Extract page in rConfig V7 Professional
Screenshot of Zabbix Raw Host Extract page in rConfig V7 Professional

Staging for Review: After validation, the data is loaded into a staging table. This allows for a thorough review to confirm that the mapped rConfig data fields are correct, ensuring that the newly imported devices are associated with the appropriate connection templates, categories, and tags.

Screenshot of Zabbix host staging table in rConfig V7 Professional
Screenshot of Zabbix host staging table in rConfig V7 Professional

Final Loading: The final step involves transferring the staged devices to the main production devices table. After this transfer, the staging table is cleared. The devices then appear in the main device table, marked with a special icon indicating that they are synced through integration.

Screenshot of Zabbix host fully loaded to production devices table in rConfig V7 Professional 
Screenshot of Zabbix host fully loaded to production devices table in rConfig V7 Professional

Seamless Operational Integration: Once the devices are loaded into the production table, they are automatically incorporated into standard rConfig scheduled tasks, automations, or any other rConfig feature that utilizes the device data (like categories and tags). This integration facilitates a seamless operational workflow between the platforms. Users can even access these devices directly in Zabbix from within the rConfig UI, streamlining operations management.

After all the above steps are completed, and the initial setup is done future loads are completed on a scheduled and automation basis using the rConfig Task manager.

Screenshot of rConfig Device detail view for a Zabbix integrated host
Screenshot of rConfig Device detail view for a Zabbix integrated host

This detailed setup and validation process ensures that the integration between rConfig and Zabbix is not only effective but also enhances the functionality and efficiency of managing network devices across platforms.

Case Study: Enhancing Network Management for a Las Vegas Entertainment Organization

  1. Challenge: A prominent Las Vegas entertainment organization faced significant difficulties in managing the diverse and complex network that supports their extensive operations, including gaming, security, and hospitality services. The primary issues were outdated network inventories and inefficient management of network configurations across numerous devices, leading to operational disruptions and security vulnerabilities.
  2. Solution: To address these challenges, the organization implemented the integration of rConfig with Zabbix, focusing on automating and centralizing the network management process. This solution aimed to synchronize network device inventories across the organization’s extensive operations, ensuring accurate and real-time data availability.
  3. Implementation: The integration process began with setting up Zabbix to continuously monitor and gather data from network devices across different venues and services. This data was then extracted, standardized, and loaded into rConfig, where it could be used for automated configuration management and backup. The setup also included sophisticated mapping and validation to ensure all data transferred between Zabbix and rConfig was accurate and relevant.

Benefits:

  • Improved Network Reliability: The automated synchronization of network inventories reduced the frequency of network failures and minimized downtime, which is crucial in the high-stakes environment of Las Vegas entertainment.
  • Enhanced Security: With more accurate and timely network data, the organization could better identify and respond to security threats, protecting sensitive information and ensuring the safety of both guests and operations.
  • Operational Efficiency: The IT team was able to shift their focus from routine network maintenance to strategic initiatives that enhanced overall business operations, including integrating new technologies and improving guest experiences.
  • Scalability: The integration provided a scalable solution that could accommodate future expansion, whether adding new devices or incorporating new technologies or venues into the network.
  • Outcome: The implementation of the rConfig and Zabbix integration dramatically transformed the organization’s network management capabilities. The IT department noted a substantial reduction in the manpower and time required for routine maintenance, while operational uptime improved significantly. The organization now enjoys a robust, streamlined network management system that supports its dynamic environment, ensuring that both guests and staff benefit from reliable and secure network services.

This case study highlights the power of effective network management solutions in supporting complex operations and enhancing business efficiency and security within the entertainment industry.

Conclusion: Forging Ahead with Innovative Partnerships

In conclusion, the Zabbix platform stands out as a cornerstone in network monitoring, renowned for its extensive capabilities in real-time monitoring, problem detection, and alerting. Its robust architecture not only supports a broad range of network environments but also offers the flexibility and scalability necessary for today’s diverse technological landscapes. The platform’s ability to provide detailed and accurate network insights is crucial for organizations aiming to maintain optimal operational continuity and security.

The integration of Zabbix with rConfig, a globally reliable and robust network configuration management (NCM) solution, enhances these benefits significantly, creating a synergistic relationship that leverages the strengths of both platforms. For customers and partners, this integration means not only smoother and more efficient network management but also the assurance that they are supported by two of the leading solutions in the industry. Together, Zabbix and rConfig deliver a comprehensive network management experience that drives efficiency, reduces costs, and ensures a higher level of network reliability and security, positioning them as indispensable tools in the toolkit of any organization serious about its network infrastructure.

About rConfig

rConfig is an industry leader in network configuration management and automation. Founded in 2010 and based in Ireland, rConfig has been at the forefront of delivering innovative solutions that simplify the complexities of network management. Our software is designed to be both powerful and user-friendly, making it an ideal choice for IT professionals across a variety of sectors, including education, government, manufacturing, and large global enterprises.

With the capability to manage up to 10s of 1000s of devices, rConfig offers robust functionalities such as automated config backups, compliance management, and network automation. Our platform is vendor-agnostic, which allows seamless integration with a diverse range of network devices and systems, from traditional IT to IoT and OT environments. This flexibility ensures that our clients can manage all aspects of their network configurations, regardless of the underlying technology.

rConfig is committed to continuous innovation and customer-centric solutions, with industry first solutions such as API backups and our Script Integration Engine. Our native integration with platforms like Zabbix exemplifies our dedication to enhancing network management through strategic partnerships. This collaboration not only streamlines operations but also amplifies the benefits provided, ensuring that our customers have access to the most advanced tools in the industry.

 

The post Enhancing Network Synergy: rConfig’s Native Integration with Zabbix appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Case Study: Monitoring with Zabbix and AI

Post Syndicated from Aurea Araujo original https://blog.zabbix.com/case-study-monitoring-with-zabbix-and-ai/28045/

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data monitoring are working together to digitally transform relationships, businesses, and people. In telecommunications, predictive analysis based on data collection plays a crucial role in development. Starting with version 6.0 of Zabbix, users have benefited from updates in predictive functions and machine learning, which make it possible for them to study the data monitored by Zabbix and integrate it with AI modules.

Danilo Barros, co-founder of Lunio (a Zabbix Certified Partner in Brazil), presented the results of using Zabbix combined with telecom data monitoring through AI and machine learning at Zabbix Conference Brazil in 2022. Keep reading to get the whole story!

The scenario

With over 600 OLTs (Optical Line Terminals – the fiberoptic infrastructure used by internet providers) as well as 400,000 customers across more than 800 cities and 20 states in Brazil, Lunio’s client manages a staggering amount of data. This monitoring is essential for smooth operations and to guarantee that there are no negative impacts on users and no overload for customer service agents in the event of accidents.

A primary challenge for telecom clients is the overload of calls to customer service in the event of massive network incidents. With so many customers, every precaution must be taken to avoid clogging phone lines during outages or service failures.

“You can’t achieve customer satisfaction under such circumstances, and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) drops drastically.”

 

Danilo Barros, co-founder of Lunio

Mapping needs

Considering the client’s operational structure, a series of customer needs were identified, focusing on six main points:

1. Automation: With notifications via digital channels for each event
2. Speed: Aiming for improved customer service
3. Operational costs: Budget optimization
4. Root cause analysis: Quick identification of the cause of events
5. Predictability: The ability to analyze problems and identify trends
6. Reporting: Identifying incidents and following regulations from ANATEL (National Telecommunications Agency)

With these interests in mind, it was possible to reassess the use of tools previously employed by the telecom client, which at the time served unique functions in the process. Each tool had its usage and information verification time, which could impact hundreds of users in a massive-scale incident. The key challenges identified by the Lunio team included:

  • Integrations: Systems needed to be interconnected
  • Integrity: Constant data updates
  • Topology: With system mapping through specific programs
  • Business rules: Respecting the development of local processes
  • Performance: The monitoring and automation of 600,000 assets
  • High availability: Dozens of data centers catering to local demand

Once the needs and challenges were identified, it was time to promote change within the client. By integrating systems and using Zabbix to monitor over 600,000 items, understand incidents, and predict potential future errors, the technical teams at Lunio created LunioAI, a “super attendant” with analytical and predictive capabilities as well as the ability to continuously learn.

“This guy (LunioIA) learns from each event, understanding each topology that occurs in the client’s network.”

 

Danilo Barros, co-founder of Lunio

In the initial response tests, LunioAI was able to analyze and evaluate massive events in a minute and a half. Over time, this was reduced to 30 seconds, making the return to the technical team increasingly swift and positively impacting incident resolution.

The results

Throughout the development and improvement of LunioIA, the operations chain was involved in predictive analyses of potential events on the network, providing technical professionals with the information needed to perform preventive maintenance on monitored items.

LunioIA considers data from integrated systems, FTTH (fiber to the home) environments, data centers, and items, all as part of the Zabbix monitoring environment. It can then diagnose events, understand the severity of an event, and find resolution points – without the need for human resources in the process.

As a result, when physical attendants were contacted by customers experiencing difficulties with the service, instead of going through the entire process to understand what happened, the attendant could perform a search using the customer’s CPF (Individual Taxpayer Registry Identification) and then access a summary of the events, causes, and solutions identified by artificial intelligence combined with data monitoring through Zabbix.

In conclusion

This example happens to come from the telecommunications industry, but it’s not difficult to see how the ability of Zabbix to integrate the data monitored by Zabbix with AI modules can benefit companies in almost any industry.

You can find out more about what we can do across a variety of industries by visiting our website or requesting a demo.

The post Case Study: Monitoring with Zabbix and AI appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Case Study: Monitoring Railway Infrastructure for Infrabel

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/case-study-monitoring-railway-infrastructure-for-infrabel/28035/

Infrabel is a government-owned public limited company that builds, owns, maintains, and upgrades the Belgian railway network, makes its capacity available to railway operator companies, and handles train traffic control. Headquartered in Brussels, Infrabel employs over 9,000 people and manages 3,602 kilometers of rail lines.

The challenge

Infrabel needed a monitoring solution that was flexible enough to manage not only infrastructure, but also OS level metrics, data centers, service and application states, and the availability of railway infrastructure components.

The solution

To begin with, Zabbix agents are deployed on railway station screens and broadcasting systems. This is possible because under the hood these pieces of hardware they run Debian OS, which means they can be monitored on the OS level by Zabbix agents right out of the box with our official templates.

This can be very easily automated together with low level discovery, autoregistration, or network discovery. Devices can be pinged from Zabbix proxies or Zabbix servers to check if they are available. If they are unavailable, Zabbix sends a notification, after which an engineer either restores the network connectivity or replaces the hardware.

In addition, Infrabel also uses Zabbix to retrieve and monitor data collected from ActiveMQ. This is where a combination of custom bash scripts and Zabbix sender is used, so the required data (also related to the railway infrastructure and data centre, hardware, and software) is retrieved from ActiveMQ via Bash script, then forwarded to Zabbix sender via a wrapper script, sent to the Zabbix server or proxy, stored and analyzed in Zabbix, and acted upon if required.

The results

Infrabel found that they could get the most out of Zabbix by integrating it with a third-party ticketing system they were already using. The integration itself is simple – when Zabbix generates a problem, the Zabbix API is then used to retrieve the problems related to a particular set of triggers that need to be forwarded to this third-party system.

These alerts are then forwarded via API to whatever system Infrabel requires – Zabbix has a variety of integrations available right out-of-the-box using web hooks, including Slack, JIRA, Microsoft Teams, and many others. Messengers can also be used with Zabbix, but Infrabel has opted to use Zabbix API for their custom ticketing solution.

In conclusion

Infrabel is the perfect example of how the flexibility of Zabbix allows it to adapt to any industry or need. The possibility to use Zabbix API, web hooks, or a combination of both was a game-changer for Infrabel – just as it could be for any customer in any industry.

You can learn more about what we can do for customers across a variety of industries by visiting our website or requesting a demo.

The post Case Study: Monitoring Railway Infrastructure for Infrabel appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Case Study: Zabbix at the European Space Agency

Post Syndicated from Arturs Lontons original https://blog.zabbix.com/case-study-zabbix-at-the-european-space-agency/28024/

The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 22-member intergovernmental body devoted to space exploration. Headquartered in Paris and with a global staff of around 2,200, the ESA was founded in 1975. Its annual budget was €7.08 billion in 2023.

The challenge

The Columbus laboratory is the European module of the International Space Station and the cornerstone of Europe’s participation. Positioned on the starboard side of the Station’s leading edge, it is designed to provide an environment for pursuing research and development in a wide variety of fields. Its characteristics include:

  • Payload complement flexibility, provided by a modular design and serviced by a regular logistics, maintenance, and upgrade capability
  • A permanent crew presence for servicing payload support systems and interacting with payloads
  • A continuously available ground infrastructure for monitoring and controlling onboard activities

Columbus provides internal payload accommodation for multidisciplinary research into material science, fluid physics, and life sciences, while the External Payload Facility (EPF) hosts space science and Earth observation payloads.

Academics on Earth perform their tests on Columbus remotely – programming them and getting the results. The infrastructure required for these tests and the payloads that get sent back and forth require a flexible and dependable monitoring solution, and that’s where Zabbix enters the picture.

The solution

Zabbix proxy was deployed in the Columbus module alongside other software required for research, operations, and connectivity. The Zabbix server and frontend are deployed in the ground data center, and this is what the proxy communicates with.

In addition to proxies, we have a Zabbix sender and Agent 2 that are used on this infrastructure, which is made of VMS and containers running different kinds of services. Data is collected in a very ordinary fashion – Zabbix Agent 2 performs native checks because there is still server hardware running with operating systems and OS level resources that need to be monitored by the Agent.

We mix these native checks with user parameters which execute custom checks based on scripts or commands for commercial off-the-shelf components. The agent is extended depending on the requirements of the components. It then collects those metrics and sends them to the proxy. Scripting is used for custom components, and because Zabbix is language agnostic, any type of programming or scripting language works. It gets wrapped together with Zabbix sender, which then sends data to the proxy, which then sends data to the server.

Because there are so many custom services and metrics that need to be monitored (the number of high priority files in the transfer queue for a particular payload, for example) and because metrics, services, and payloads can change over time, the ESA needed to automate a way of automatically discovering these, displaying them, and collecting data for them. We used low-level discovery together with some scripting to discover and automatically start monitoring new payloads.

The results

Thanks to Zabbix’s visualization capabilities, the ESA’s team has found it easy to observe their dashboards and react to alerts in real time.

The ESA has also found Zabbix proxy to be an ideal solution for their needs, because if a link between the ground data center and the Columbus module goes down, the proxy keeps collecting local metrics, stores them in its own database, and then sends them back to the ground once the connection is restored. No such situation has arisen yet, but Zabbix has performed flawlessly in all test scenarios.

Monitoring is a never-ending process and there’s always room for improvement, but it’s reasonable to expect that the ESA will continue working on Zabbix and finding new metrics and new ways of improving monitoring.

In conclusion

Part of the beauty of Zabbix has always been its adaptability – it can be as simple or as complex as any user needs it to be. The simplicity of the Zabbix setup in this scenario (as opposed to a more modular setup with 4 or 5 pieces of software) is what makes it ideal for deployment by the ESA on the International Space Station.

To learn more about what we do for customers across multiple industries, visit our website or request a demo.

The post Case Study: Zabbix at the European Space Agency appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Making Life Easier for MSPs: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/making-life-easier-for-msps-the-zabbix-advantage/28004/

Times have never been better for managed service providers (MSPs). The demand for remote monitoring services has skyrocketed as cloud adoption rises and working from home becomes the new standard. The number of organizations that trust MSPs with the everyday functioning of their mission-critical IT systems and processes has grown rapidly – nearly 9 out of 10 small and medium enterprises either use or plan to use MSPs to manage their infrastructure.

As a service provider, an MSP needs to be ahead of the curve at all times and adopt a constantly-shifting and evolving set of best practices for remote monitoring and management. At Zabbix, we’ve created the ultimate solution for full-stack IT monitoring, and we’ve built in features and benefits that are designed to make it as easy as possible for MSPs to provide top-quality monitoring to their clients as well. Keep reading to learn more about what makes Zabbix the ideal monitoring tool for any MSP.

There are no limits to what you can monitor with Zabbix

And when we say no limits, we mean no limits! Zabbix literally allows you to monitor anything from the frequency of a baby’s cries to the hydraulic systems on a space station. From hardware to software to middleware, VEP resources, virtual resources, and more, Zabbix is capable of monitoring millions of metrics.  As an MSP, you’re no doubt called upon to tackle anything from basic network and server monitoring to highly advanced cloud, container, and Kubernetes monitoring. Zabbix lets you keep it all under one roof and handle it with a single solution.

You can integrate Zabbix with any client’s systems

Today’s MSP needs to be able to seamlessly integrate their tools and processes with the IT frameworks and ITIL guidelines of their clients as well as their business goals, strategies, and best practices. Zabbix is designed to work with third party solutions and boasts a constantly-growing list of official integrations.

When you’re notified of a potential problem, you can easily forward your alerts to third-party ITSM, helpdesk, and messaging systems, enhance them with the additional information that Zabbix is able to collect, and freely customize the outgoing messages for different clients – just one of the areas where Zabbix stands out as an ideal multitenant solution.

Zabbix makes reporting and analysis simple

MSPs need to be able to quickly generate and share regular reports and analyses with clients, keeping them up to speed on the status, performance, and health of their infrastructure. Ideally, those reports should be clear, concise, and actionable, highlighting key metrics and insights via graphs, charts, and tables, identifying trends, and predicting potential issues. Done right, reporting can enhance service quality and position you as an ideal strategic partner.

When you make the decision to deploy Zabbix scheduled reports, you’ll get daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly overviews of the infrastructures and business services you’ve been tasked to monitor. You can also track the changes performed in your Zabbix instance with our robust and detailed built-in audit logging functionality, all of which is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to keep your clients in the loop.

Zabbix makes data easy to visualize

Much like the world around them, MSPs have become increasingly more data-driven. It’s easy to understand why – when you have critical information right in front of you, it’s easier to see trends you would have otherwise missed, which in turn helps you make better-informed decisions that can help guide you to success.

Zabbix dashboards are built to serve as visual storybooks for your business. They transform complex monitoring metrics into an engaging narrative, presenting intimidating data in an intuitive, insightful layout and making data interpretation simple.

You can customize dashboards, screens, and slideshows to easily track the status of a tenant’s infrastructure, applications, and business services. You can also leverage a wide range of dashboard widgets to aggregate, transform, and graph your data while also tracking your monitoring endpoints on geographical and network maps, identifying the status of the most critical alarms, and sorting your monitoring endpoints by resource usage.

Zabbix makes effective security management easier

When it comes to cyberattacks, MSPs are up against a constantly changing threat landscape, not to mention the challenges they face in protecting diverse, multitenant setups. With Zabbix, you can secure connections to and from your monitoring endpoints either with certificates or via pre-shared key encryption.

Multitenant MSPs can also control access to different Zabbix elements and features by creating unique Zabbix roles for your tenants while taking advantage of the native permission logic to isolate monitoring endpoints between tenants. Host groups and subgroups let you decide what your tenants can see, and encrypted agents help to secure all communication, including proxy-to-server communication.

You can also rely on encrypted communication between Zabbix components as well as flexible permissions, user authentication, and integrations with secret vaults for storing passwords and other sensitive information.

Zabbix is inherently scalable

There are no two ways about it – surviving as an MSP in today’s business environment means being able to scale. The number of customers that you support is likely to vary from year to year or even month to month. In order to add customers without compromising your level of service, you need to scale up. And if your customer base shrinks, you will probably need to decrease the size of your infrastructure and operations in order to avoid spending money on services that your business no longer needs.

By deploying Zabbix proxies and letting them collect and process data on behalf of the primary Zabbix server node, you can easily scale your Zabbix instance as your client base expands – no matter where those clients happen to be. And if you need to scale back your business for any reason, it’s a simple matter of deleting the unused proxies.

Zabbix is uniquely cost-efficient

A key benefit of Zabbix has always been that it’s open-source – there are no license fees associated with using our software, and you’re not locked into an endless, inflexible contract. Meanwhile, our extensive range of competitively-priced professional services are designed to fit the unique needs of MSPs and give you the most effective solutions as quickly as possible.

Perhaps most importantly for a multitenant MSP, Zabbix is built to run without the need for a lot of infrastructure or resources. With Zabbix, you can offer your clients more flexibility than comparable monitoring solutions while dramatically lowering the amount of hardware, CPU power, and costs involved.

Conclusion

In order to serve the constantly evolving needs of their clients, MSPs demand more flexibility and features than ever before – and this naturally extends to the monitoring solutions they choose. Rather than offer a few additional services to target MSPs, we’ve built our business with them in mind, which is why we offer a range of feature-rich technical support plans specifically for MSPs.

To learn more about what Zabbix can do for MSPs like yours, visit our website or request a demo.

The post Making Life Easier for MSPs: The Zabbix Advantage appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Saving Time and Money with Zabbix Professional Services

Post Syndicated from Ronalds Sulcs original https://blog.zabbix.com/saving-time-and-money-with-zabbix-professional-services/27951/

One of the most common questions the Zabbix Sales team gets is, “How do you make money selling an open-source product that literally anyone in the world can download for free? Where’s the business?”

The simplest and shortest answer is that we’ve developed a three-part approach to our business – build a best-in-class monitoring solution, make that solution open source and available to everyone, and develop a set of Zabbix professional services that help our users save time and money.

There’s a lot of information available about the first two parts of this trifecta, so in this post I’m going to complete it by going into a little bit more detail about what Zabbix professional services can do for you and why they’re well worth the investment.

What do our clients look for?

Our professional services are designed to be flexible enough to fit your unique business demands, and they include technical support, turnkey and migration solutions, professional training, and template building integrations. These are the main services that my team and I see our clients expressing an interest in on a daily basis, so let’s take a look at each one individually.

Zabbix turnkey/migration services

This service is perfect for Zabbix users who are new to Zabbix and who would like to either start using Zabbix or migrate from another solution to Zabbix. Because they’re just starting out, we help them design their Zabbix environment, deploy it, and make it secure. Whether it’s just a local installation for devices in one location or if the devices and applications you would like to monitor are spread around the globe worldwide, distribution is not an issue thanks to our scalable Zabbix architecture.

We start out by doing an analysis to make sure that whatever your requirements are, we’ll be able to meet them. Based on this, we provide a specific timeline and a cost estimate of how much this service will cost you. Once we have approval from your side, we move forward to implementation, which includes documentation, a full knowledge transfer, and constant check-ins to make sure your expectations are met.

It’s a service that quickly pays for itself when you consider the potential downsides of attempting to go the DIY route – notably, a high risk of delay or failure (which will end up costing you money and time rather than saving it). When our team guides your Zabbix deployment and implementation, your project gets done properly and on time, with an average implementation time of 10 days as opposed to several months if you go the self-service route. Thanks to the skills and experience of our engineers, we’re accurate in 95% of our project estimates, so it’s easy to calculate the time and money you’ll save by leaving it to us.

Zabbix technical support

Technical support is intended for clients and Zabbix users who have already deployed Zabbix and are using it on a daily basis. It’s an annual subscription, with pricing dependent on the size of your Zabbix environment and how many legal entities will be using it.

The silver tier is meant for simple installations, where only one Zabbix server is available. The gold and platinum tiers are dependent on your Zabbix environment, including how many proxies you have. The enterprise and global tiers support unlimited Zabbix servers and proxies, and they include plenty of other useful services, including training, consulting, and even development.

Zabbix also offers a specialized managed service provider (MSP) support subscription, tailored for companies that provide monitoring services for their own clients. These companies need to have support for their clients as well as themselves, which means that the support structure is slightly different, with the key differentiator being the number of hosts.

When it comes to saving time and money with Zabbix professional services, there’s no better move than purchasing a Zabbix technical support package. In many cases, our clients need to dedicate at least one specialist to take care of their Zabbix environment and make sure that everything is up and running. But what happens when that individual is out of office for any reason, or needs assistance?

A Zabbix support subscription costs considerably less than hiring an additional engineer or outsourcing issues to a third-party specialist, and the level of expertise in our team simply can’t be matched – you’ll have a full team of support engineers who are available around the clock to jump on any request that you have and provide you with an answer whenever you need it. Not only that, but tickets created within our support portal are nearly always answered in less than one hour, regardless of SLAs.

Zabbix template building and integrations

On our website, you’ll find an extensive list of available integrations, many of which are supported by Zabbix directly and many more of which are built and developed by our global community. But what if your specific needs call for a template that doesn’t exist yet?

Not to worry – not only do we maintain a massive library of existing templates, but on average, it takes only 3 to 10 days for us to create a standard template from scratch. For standard templates that we want to maintain for future versions, we’re ready to give a fixed price and cover part of the cost of the development of the template ourselves – something that definitely wouldn’t be on the table if you were to have a third-party vendor create the template for you.

Zabbix professional training

When you invest in Zabbix professional training courses for your employees, what you’re really investing in is improved efficiency, faster project completion time, and a much lower risk of project failure.

The effectiveness of employees who have gone through a Zabbix training course is impossible to miss – they learn tips and tricks about how to work better with Zabbix that wouldn’t be possible for them to pick up anywhere else. Our goal is to give you and your employees comprehensive knowledge about how to use Zabbix as effectively as possible.

Here are our core courses – user, specialist, professional, and expert. Our recommendation is to take them all in a row, as it’s the best way to make sure that you’ll be equipped with the most up-to-date subject knowledge. There’s also a bargain involved if you purchase them as a bundle!

We’ve also got advanced, one-day courses that can be taken separately whenever you need, depending on the topic that you’re interested in understanding better.

Learning is a lifelong process, and because we strive to create new upgrades and put out new versions every year, Zabbix upgrade courses are the perfect way to quickly brush up on your knowledge and keep your skills relevant.

All of our training courses are designed to produce a quick, measurable return on investment, equipping you and your employees with the knowledge you need to get the most out of Zabbix. Our website is full of testimonials and additional information, so it’s the perfect place to start if you have any questions or you want to get started on your training journey.

Conclusion

From the beginning, our goal at Zabbix has been a world without interruptions. In practice, that means giving businesses of all kinds the all-in-one, Enterprise-level solution they need to monitor their devices, applications, and processes. With the help of Zabbix professional services, you can help you minimize or even eliminate downtime, so that you can keep your business is up and running at all times, increasing your efficiency, and generating more revenue in the process.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us to learn more – we’re standing by with the answers to any questions you may have.

The post Saving Time and Money with Zabbix Professional Services appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What Makes a Zabbix Conference Benelux Special?

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/what-makes-a-zabbix-conference-benelux-special/27789/

Zabbix has always seen our mission as going beyond simply delivering a product. From the start, building a strong global community has created and supported a better business model, and an important part of building our community is our practice of taking our message to the places where our users, partners, and potential clients live and work.

That’s where Zabbix Conferences enter the picture. Since 2011, they’ve grown from yearly events on our home turf in Riga to multi-day extravaganzas in locations as far-flung as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Porto Alegre. There’s something about the conferences in the Benelux countries, however, that seems to boost our reach a little further and create a little more enthusiasm every time we visit.

“Zabbix Conference Benelux is a can’t-miss event for European Zabbix enthusiasts and professionals. It attracts Zabbix experts from the retail, IT, banking, and government sectors (just to name a few), and brings everyone together with a shared sense of purpose. It’s the perfect place to network with like-minded individuals and come away with plenty of inspiration for your own projects.”

– Alexei Vladishev, Zabbix Founder and CEO

There’s just something about Benelux

The politico-economic union of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg is a fascinating locale for any event – the three nations that make up the union each bring their own customs, history, language, and business culture to the mix, which creates an intriguing backdrop for any kind of business.

“A Zabbix Conference Benelux is a unique event because of the way the people of the region make their guests feel welcome and create an atmosphere of belonging, togetherness, and support.”

-Alexei Vladishev, Zabbix Founder and CEO

From our perspective at Zabbix, Benelux is home not only to a sizable community of existing clients and partners, but also an enormous pool of potential new ones. We’ve thought long and hard about what we can offer to that particular group when we make our (almost) annual pilgrimage to Benelux, so keep reading for some insight into what makes a Zabbix Conference Benelux not only special, but worth attending.

Learn from the best

Attending a Zabbix Conference Benelux is first and foremost an excellent opportunity to catch up with the very latest trends and developments in the world of IT monitoring, including Zabbix proxy high-availability and load balancing as well as automating Zabbix workflows with Zabbix API and zabbix_utils.

Our conference speakers represent a broad cross-section of industries and experiences, and they pride themselves on coming up with fresh, innovative topics – in fact, many of them share their use cases and results for the first time on our stage. What’s more, the energy and dynamics of our workshops and live Q&A sessions foster open dialogue, richer conversations, and greater innovation.

“The Zabbix Conference Benelux I attended in 2023 stands out to me because of a very informative speech by (Zabbix Trainer and Consultant at Opensource ICT Solutions) Brian Van Baekel about his experience with Zabbix in an MSP environment. On top of that, the conference was organized in the beautiful center of Antwerp, the atmosphere was very friendly as usual, and we had some fascinating events after the conference as well.” 

– Kaspars Mednis, Zabbix Chief Trainer 

Getting to know you

The world may be increasingly dominated by virtual interactions and digital connections, but there’s still something unique and special about face-to-face conferences. At Zabbix, our feeling has always been that in-person events are crucial to strengthening the bonds between our team members, our partners, and our users. A Zabbix Conference Benelux gives participants a chance to truly get in touch with the people behind our product, allowing for deeper understanding and stronger relationships, which are the foundation of all successful business collaborations.

“The year I attended (2023) I really enjoyed the overall spirit of the event, the atmosphere in Antwerp, and the opportunities to get to know the Zabbix community closer.” 

– Aleksandrs Petrovs-Gavrilovs, Zabbix Technical Support Engineer 

Drumming up new business

Attending a Zabbix Conference Benelux isn’t just about exchanging information, but also about providing attendees with opportunities for spontaneous conversations, chance encounters, and relationship-building that can lead to collaborations, partnerships, and future business opportunities for everyone involved.

Business leaders can learn about the technology and challenges of Zabbix and our partners and have a frank dialogue that helps them understand their own needs from a different perspective. And as anyone who has spent time at a Zabbix Conference Benelux can tell you, those kinds of free-flowing conversations tend to happen naturally and organically when both parties are in a friendly, welcoming environment that also happens to be just a bit outside of their home turf.

Networking and hospitality

Speaking of creating a welcoming environment, it’s impossible to underestimate how important quirky yet fun event venues and incredible hospitality are to creating an ideal event for learning and networking. Zabbix Technical Support Engineer Edgars Melveris is a veteran of Zabbix Conferences in 2020 (Utrecht, the Netherlands) and 2023 (Antwerp, Belgium). He says that it’s the combination of in-depth technical information, fascinating locales, and good times that makes a Zabbix Conference Benelux special to him.

“The National Military Museum in Utrecht really impressed me, and I also enjoyed the atmosphere and sense of community at the event venues. When it comes to conference content, (Zabbix Chief Trainer) Kaspars Mednis’ workshop on ‘New and improved SNMP bulk data collection in Zabbix 6.4’ has only become more relevant with the passage of time, and (Zabbix Trainer and Consultant at Opensource ICT Solutions) Nathan Liefting’s presentation on ‘Zabbix Native HA: Lessons Learned and Tips & Tricks’ was particularly useful to me in my role.”

-Edgars Melveris, Zabbix Technical Support Engineer

Zabbix Conference Benelux 2024 will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on May 24-25. To find out more information, register to attend, or sign up as a speaker, please visit the conference page. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon!

The post What Makes a Zabbix Conference Benelux Special? appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Striking the Right Balance: Zabbix 7.0 to be Released Under AGPLv3 License

Post Syndicated from Alexei Vladishev original https://blog.zabbix.com/striking-the-right-balance-zabbix-7-0-to-be-released-under-agplv3-license/27596/

At Zabbix, we believe that knowledge should be accessible to everyone, and we’re proud to have built a thriving community that reflects our values of openness, transparency, and cooperation. That’s why we’ve championed the open-source movement.

Our number one priority is and always has been to make sure that we’re able to provide our solution to millions, while being able to maintain and develop it.

Why AGPLv3?

Since 2001, all major and minor versions of Zabbix Monitoring Solution software have been released under GNU General Public License version 2.0 or later (GPLv2 or later), which has proven to be a strong and well-regarded copyleft license.

As the tech landscape has evolved, however, we’ve been on the lookout for a licensing solution that would allow us to stay open source while keeping our values intact, adding flexibility, and maintaining copyright protection. That’s why we’re releasing version 7.0, the next major version of Zabbix, under GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3).

AGPL V3 is an OSI-approved license that meets all criteria for Free and Open-Source Software. The purpose of AGPLv3 is to impose copyleft license on modified versions made available for use over a network, which we believe will help us strike the right balance between our open-source roots and effective copyright protection.

How will this affect the Zabbix community?

Our community impacts our popularity and the direction of our development. Their contributions are important to us, and as far as we’re concerned, the release of the 7.0 version of Zabbix software under AGPLv3 will not create any impact on any plugins, modules, or widgets released under any AGPLv3 compliant licenses. Our Contributor License Agreement (CLA) will not change in any way, and you can find the current version of it here.

In terms of templates, there is an opinion that application programming interfaces (APIs) are not protected by copyright. However, if the developer of a template considers the template copyrightable, we recommend that they release the template under any permissive or copyleft open-source software license that is AGPLv3 compliant (e.g., 3-clause BSD, MIT, Apache license 2.0, LGPLv3, GPLv3, or AGPLv3).

How will this affect Zabbix itself (the product)?

It won’t. This change will do nothing to prevent Zabbix users from using Zabbix software — in fact, the only difference is that under the AGPLv3 license users must share source code if they are modifying it and making it available to others, either by distribution or over a network. For distributors, AGPLv3 has the same source code sharing requirements as other strong copyleft licenses, including GPLv2 or later.

Conclusion

We’re honored by the number of users who love Zabbix and don’t want to see it change in any way. We believe that releasing the 7.0 version of Zabbix software under the AGPLv3 licence is the perfect balance between protecting our business interests and staying free and open source.

If you want to learn more about AGPLv3, the GNU project has a comprehensive FAQ section, and the Free Software Foundation has published a useful guide as well. We’ve added our own FAQ section below for anyone who wants more specific information, and you can also visit our updated license page.

FAQ

Why is Zabbix doing this? And why now?

Being open source is central to our business model, which is all about empowering partners to provide our customers with individual solutions. After much internal discussion, we’ve determined that moving to AGPLv3 is the best way to make sure that anyone who modifies our software makes it available to everyone. The upcoming 7.0 release provided us with the perfect time to make the move. It’s a way for us to get two birds with one stone – we can make sure that no commercial entity helps themselves to our product while circumventing copyleft requirements, and we can also make sure that anyone who does modify our code makes their modifications available to everyone.

Will this affect the Zabbix version that I already have?

Absolutely not! There is no impact on any older releases of Zabbix in any way.

The post Striking the Right Balance: Zabbix 7.0 to be Released Under AGPLv3 License appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Securing the Zabbix Frontend

Post Syndicated from Patrik Uytterhoeven original https://blog.zabbix.com/securing-the-zabbix-frontend/27700/

The frontend is what we use to login into our system. The Zabbix frontend will connect to our Zabbix server and our database. But we also send information from our laptop to the frontend. It’s important that when we enter our credentials that we can do this in a safe way. So it makes sense to make use of certificates and one way to do this is by making use of self-signed certificates.

To give you a better understanding of why your browser will warn you when using self-signed certificates, we have to know that when we request an SSL certificate from an official Certificate Authority (CA) that you submit a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to them. They in return provide you with a Signed SSL certificate. For this, they make use of their root certificate and private key.

Our browser comes with a copy of the root certificate (CA) from various authorities, or it can access it from the OS. This is why our self-signed certificates are not trusted by our browser – we don’t have any CA validation. Our only workaround is to create our own root certificate and private key.

Understanding the concepts

How to create an SSL certificate:

How SSL works – Client – Server flow:

NOTE: I have borrowed the designs from this video, which does a good job of explaining how SSL works.

Securing the Frontend with self signed SSL on Nginx

In order to configure this, there are a few steps that we need to follow:

  • Generate a private key for the CA ( Certificate Authority )
  • Generate a root certificate
  • Generate CA-Authenticated Certificates
  • Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)
  • Generate an X509 V3 certificate extension configuration file
  • Generate the certificate using our CSR, the CA private key, the CA certificate, and the config file
  • Copy the SSL certificates to your Virtual Host
  • Adapt your Nginx Zabbix config

Generate a private key for the CA

The first step is to make a folder named “SSL” so we can create our certificates and save them:

>- mkdir ~/ssl
>- cd ~/ssl
>- openssl ecparam -out myCA.key -name prime256v1 -genkey

Let’s explain all the options:

  • openssl : The tool to use the OpenSSL library, which provides us with cryptographic functions and utilities
  • out myCA.key : This part of the command specifies the output file name for the generated private key
  • name prime256v1: The name of the elliptic curve; X9.62/SECG curve over a 256 bit prime field
  • ecparam: This command is used to manipulate or generate EC parameter files
  • genkey: This option will generate an EC private key using the specified parameters

Generate a Root Certificate

openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -key myCA.key -sha256 -days 1825 -out myCA.pema

Let’s explain all the options:

  • openssl: The command-line tool for OpenSSL
  • req: This command is used for X.509 certificate signing request (CSR) management
  • x509: This option specifies that a self-signed certificate should be created
  • new: This option is used to generate a new certificate
  • nodes: This option indicates that the private key should not be encrypted. It will generates a private key without a passphrase, making it more
    convenient but potentially less secure
  • key myCA.key: This specifies the private key file (myCA.key) to be used in generating the certificate
  • sha256: This option specifies the hash algorithm to be used for the certificate. In this case, SHA-256 is chosen for stronger security
  • days 1825: This sets the validity period of the certificate in days. Here, it’s set to 1825 days (5 years)
  • out myCA.pem: This specifies the output file name for the generated certificate. In this case, “myCA.pem”

The information you enter is not so important, but it’s best to fill it in as comprehensively as possible. Just make sure you enter for CN your IP or DNS.

You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [XX]:BE
State or Province Name (full name) []:vlaams-brabant
Locality Name (eg, city) [Default City]:leuven
Organization Name (eg, company) [Default Company Ltd]:
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:192.168.0.134
Email Address []:

Generate CA-Authenticated Certificates

It’s probably good practice to use the dns name of your webiste in the name for the private key. As we use in this case an IP address rather than a dns, I will use the fictive dns zabbix.mycompany.internal.

openssl genrsa -out zabbix.mycompany.internal.key 2048

Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)

openssl req -new -key zabbix.mycompany.internal.key -out zabbix.mycompany.internal.csr

You will be asked the same set of questions as above. Once again, your answers hold minimal significance and in our case no one will inspect the certificate, so they matter even less.

You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [XX]:BE
State or Province Name (full name) []:vlaams-brabant
Locality Name (eg, city) [Default City]:leuven
Organization Name (eg, company) [Default Company Ltd]:
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:192.168.0.134
Email Address []:

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

Generate an X509 V3 certificate extension configuration file

# vi zabbix.mycompany.internal.ext

Add the following lines in your certificate extension file. Replace IP or DNS with your own values.

authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid,issuer
basicConstraints=CA:FALSE
keyUsage = digitalSignature, nonRepudiation, keyEncipherment, dataEncipherment
subjectAltName = @alt_names

[alt_names]
IP.1 = 192.168.0.133
#DNS.1 = MYDNS (You can use DNS if you have a dns name if you use IP then use the above line)

Generate the certificate using our CSR, the CA private key, the CA certificate, and the config file

openssl x509 -req -in zabbix.mycompany.internal.csr -CA myCA.pem -CAkey myCA.key \
-CAcreateserial -out zabbix.mycompany.internal.crt -days 825 -sha256 -extfile zabbix.mycompany.internal.ext

Copy the SSL certificates to our Virtual Host

cp zabbix.mycompany.internal.crt /etc/pki/tls/certs/.
cp zabbix.mycompany.internal.key /etc/pki/tls/private/.

Import the CA in Linux (RHEL)

We need to update the CA certificates, so run the below command to update the CA certs.

cp myCA.pem /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/myCA.crt
update-ca-trust extract

Import the CA in OSX

  • Open the macOS Keychain app
  • Navigate to File > Import Items
  • Choose your private key file (i.e., myCA.pem)
  • Search for the “Common Name” you provided earlier
  • Double-click on your root certificate in the list
  • Expand the Trust section
  • Modify the “When using this certificate:” dropdown to “Always Trust”
  • Close the certificate window

Import the CA in Windows

  • Open the “Microsoft Management Console” by pressing Windows + R, typing mmc, and clicking Open
  • Navigate to File > Add/Remove Snap-in
  • Select Certificates and click Add
  • Choose Computer Account and proceed by clicking Next
  • Select Local Computer and click Finish
  • Click OK to return to the MMC window
  • Expand the view by double-clicking Certificates (local computer)
  • Right-click on Certificates under “Object Type” in the middle column, select All Tasks, and then Import
  • Click Next, followed by Browse. Change the certificate extension dropdown next to the filename field to All Files (.) and locate the myCA.pem file
  • Click Open, then Next
  • Choose “Place all certificates in the following store.” with “Trusted Root Certification Authorities store” as the default. Proceed by clicking Next, then Finish, to finalize the wizard
  • If all went well you should find your certificate under Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates

Warning! You also need to import the myCA.crt file in your OS. We are not an official CA, so we have to import it in our OS and tell it to trust this Certificate. This action depends on the OS you use.

As you are using OpenSSL, you should also create a strong Diffie-Hellman group, which is used in negotiating Perfect Forward Secrecy with clients. You can do this by typing:

openssl dhparam -out /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem 2048

Adapt your Nginx Zabbix config

Add the following lines to your Nginx configuration, modifying the file paths as needed. Replace the existing lines with port 80 with this configuration. This will enable SSL and HTTP2.

# vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/zabbix.conf
server {
listen 443 http2 ssl;
listen [::]:443 http2 ssl;
server_name <ip qddress>;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/zabbix.mycompany.internal.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/pki/tls/private/zabbix.mycompany.internal.key;
ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;

To redirect traffic from port 80 to 443 we can add the following lines above our https block:

server {
listen 80;
server_name _; #dns or ip is also possible
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

Restart all services and allow https traffic

systemctl restart php-fpm.service
systemctl restart nginx

firewall-cmd --add-service=https --permanent
firewall-cmd —reload

When we go to our url http://<IP or DNS>/ we get redirected to our https:// page and when we check we can see that our site is secure:

You can check out this article in its original form (and keep an eye out for more of Patrik’s helpful tips) at https://trikke76.github.io/Zabbix-Book/security/securing-zabbix/.

The post Securing the Zabbix Frontend appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Discover A World of Opportunity at Zabbix Meetings

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/discover-a-world-of-opportunity-at-zabbix-meetings/27684/

From the very beginning, Zabbix has been fortunate to have a large, diverse, and truly global community. Engaging with them is the key to getting the most out of Zabbix, and to that end, we introduced Zabbix Meetings in late 2022.

Zabbix Meetings are global get-togethers in locations from Stockholm to Shanghai to Sao Paulo and all points in between. They were created to serve as the first step on the journey to working with Zabbix and getting to know us better, giving Zabbix beginners a chance to learn about our capabilities directly from our team and our partners.

They’re also an opportunity for more experienced Zabbix users to learn from others, share their knowledge, and stay up to date on the latest developments in the Zabbix ecosystem – all in one event.

Whether you’re new to Zabbix or an experienced professional, we’re confident that attending a Zabbix Meeting will help you solve problems, exchange ideas, and grow your Zabbix expertise. Accordingly, here are 4 key benefits you can expect from showing up at a Zabbix Meeting near you.

Build relationships with our team members

Businesses are built on relationships, and ours is no exception. We still believe that there’s no substitute for meeting in person when it comes to building a strong culture, developing rapport with our users and partners, and connecting on a deeper level.

Attending Zabbix Meetings and getting to know our team is a great way to build trust and put some faces to names, which will allow you to know who exactly on our team you can reach out to when you’re shopping around for the best deals on support packages, when you need assistance, or when you want to collaborate on a cool new feature or project that can be a game-changer for your business.

Hear use cases that apply to your own organization

If you’re thinking about adopting Zabbix or expanding your existing Zabbix setup, it can be invaluable to learn how other companies similar to yours have tried and succeeded with it. Our use cases come from actual satisfied Zabbix users and highlight the effectiveness of a specific feature or benefit, while sharing notable results.

They’re also ideal for providing best practices that you can apply to your own industry. We can just about guarantee that no matter what you’re trying to do with Zabbix, a similar organization has already succeeded at it and would be glad to show you how they pulled it off. What’s more, seeing Zabbix-related use cases presented can also help you sell the benefits of Zabbix to stakeholders in your organization, gain buy-in, and present the implementation process.

Get direct, real-time answers to your questions

Taking part in a Zabbix Meeting is an excellent way to grow your professional network and make new business connections – we’ve created them to be the perfect place to meet a variety of like-minded industry professionals. That said, simply attending a Zabbix Meeting isn’t a recipe for success – if you’re not asking questions, you’re definitely not getting the full experience.

Asking good questions at Zabbix Meetings can help you gain valuable information and make the most of your time and the opportunity. The presentations and use cases that are the backbone of any Zabbix Meeting are detailed, in-depth, and full of technical details, so we always offer an extended Q&A session at the end of each one to make sure you walk away from the Meeting with a full understanding of all the information presented.

Learn more about what Zabbix can do for you

If you’re signing up to attend a Zabbix Meeting near you, there’s a good chance that you already know a fair amount about Zabbix and what we do. There are plenty of ways to find out the basics, including visiting our website, checking out our latest blog posts, or having a look at our famous forums.

No matter how much time you spend reading up on us, however, some information is bound to slip through the cracks. You might know about our technical support offers, but there’s no substitute for chatting with one of our support engineers about how you use Zabbix and hearing their opinion about what type of support plan best suits your specific needs.

You might also know that we offer training sessions, but that’s not the same as hearing from one of our certified trainers exactly how a Zabbix Certified training session has upskilled employees at a company just like yours and helped them save money, reduce downtime, and do things with Zabbix that they never imagined possible.

Conclusion

There’s simply no substitute for a Zabbix Meeting when it comes to learning more about what we can do for you. Have a look at our Events page to see when we’ll be in a location near you and be sure to sign up – we’re looking forward to seeing you soon!

The post Discover A World of Opportunity at Zabbix Meetings appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Keeping Remote Teams Connected: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/keeping-remote-teams-connected-the-zabbix-advantage/27551/

The popularity of remote teams may have exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not a phenomenon that’s likely to trend downward anytime soon. High-profile organizations like 3M, Dropbox, Shopify, and LinkedIn are continuing to enthusiastically embrace remote working, essentially making it the “default setting” for their employees.

The shift toward remote working is not without its challenges, however. Organizations of all sizes often have little time to set up the kind of networking infrastructure and efficient processes that make sure remote workers are just as connected and productive as their on-site counterparts. In this article, we’ll take a quick look at some of the most important network monitoring challenges that remote teams face and show how Zabbix can help you tackle them as efficiently as possible.

Infrastructure and connectivity issues

A remote network is essentially a grouping of multiple smaller network setups, each with their own set of variables that can affect performance. The differences between network system and infrastructure quality at different remote destinations can often lead to low overall network performance, which in turn makes it a challenge to provide the kind of high-speed communication needed to run the remote automation tools and software applications used by remote employees and teams.

By providing straightforward and easy-to-understand visibility into a network’s connected devices and how data moves between them, Zabbix makes it easy to automatically compare data and identify any drop in network performance.

With Zabbix, you can easily keep an eye on network routers and switches, especially internet provider and uplink ports up/down. You can also monitor network latency, the error rate on ports, the packet loss to important devices, and network utilization on important ports with net.if.in/net.if.out. Here are some example triggers:

High Network Utilization: avg(/Router ABC/net.if.in[eth0],5m)>80MB
High Packet Loss: avg(/Router ABC/icmppingloss,5m)>5
High Latency: avg(/Router ABC/icmppingsec,5m)>0.1

What’s more, Zabbix allows you to create network maps with important network devices and real-time data, as well as dashboards with maps and single item/gauge widgets, all of which makes it far easier to achieve the uninterrupted connectivity that remote teams depend on.

Staying safe

Remote locations aren’t islands that can be completely isolated from external traffic. Staying vigilant and doing everything possible to eliminate data breaches is important, and taking advantage of strong encryption methods, network scanning tools, and firewalls to protect your systems is a good start. However, using a whole suite of tools to protect security can add more difficulty when it comes to integrating and monitoring them.

With Zabbix, you can count on enterprise-grade security, including encrypted communication between components, a flexible user permission schema that can be easily applied to a distributed environment, and custom user roles with a granular set of permissions for different types of users.

Zabbix also provides native support for HTTP, LDAP, and SAML authentication (which gives you an additional layer of security and improves your user experience while working with Zabbix), the ability to restrict access to sensitive information by limiting which metrics can be collected in your environment, and the ability to track changes in your environment by utilizing the Audit log. It’s all designed to make sure that there are no compromises on the security of your data when you decide to go remote.

Scalability

As a remote organization grows and its distributed systems expand, a good monitoring solution needs to be able to grow along with it in order to prevent gaps in coverage while maintaining performance and reliability. Zabbix gives you limitless scalability in the form of Zabbix proxies, which act as independent intermediaries that collect performance and availability data on behalf of a Zabbix server. You can roll out new proxies as fast as you need them, and because Zabbix is free and open source, you don’t have to worry about additional licensing costs.

Zabbix proxies allow you to see at a glance what resources are being used on your network at any given moment, which is especially handy if, like most remote teams, you have tens or even hundreds of servers and network appliances to monitor. You can also execute remote commands in remote locations – either on the proxies themselves or on the agents monitored by the proxy, and multiple frontends can be deployed for load balancing as well as for improved security and connectivity. Proxy docker containers and cloud options are available as well, enhancing flexibility and making Zabbix ideal for any organization that spans the globe (or aspires to).

Managing multiple solutions

The legacy software and systems you use were most likely designed to work in a traditional networking model. Remote working, as we’ve seen, presents a whole new range of challenges when it comes to compatibility and support.

We’ve created Zabbix to be as easy as possible to integrate with existing systems. You can easily monitor any operating system, cloud service, IP telephony service, docker container, or web server/database backend. We provide out-of-the-box monitoring for the world’s leading hardware and software vendors, and our extensively documented API makes it easy to create workflows and integrate with other systems. In addition, you can also integrate Zabbix with the most popular helpdesk, messaging, and ITSM systems, such as Slack, Jira, MS Teams, and many others.

Not only that, Zabbix is designed to serve as the ideal monitoring solution for multi-tenant environments. It serves as a single pane of glass for your entire infrastructure, and it’s easy to visualize everything that’s happening with your network with unique maps, dashboards, and templates.

Conclusion

The days of large teams all working together under the same roof are a thing of the past – the remote working trend will only accelerate as technology improves and employees get more accustomed to working with colleagues across multiple locations. That’s why it’s of paramount importance to make sure your monitoring solution has the built-in flexibility and scalability to grow with your team and your business.

If you want to see for yourself how Zabbix can help you effectively monitor a globally distributed network, contact us.

 

 

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The Zabbix/HackerOne Bug Bounty Program: A Year of Results

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/the-zabbix-hackerone-bug-bounty-program-a-year-of-results/27490/

As cyberattacks increase exponentially and the cost of maintaining dedicated internal security teams skyrockets, the popularity of the “bug bounty” program (which sees outside hackers paid by organizations to legally expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities) is exploding.

Organizations large and small are running programs to root out the security vulnerabilities in their products. Governments and policymakers are changing laws to make the approach easier to adopt, while private sector tech giants are also offering generous rewards – Apple alone has reportedly paid out more than $20 million via its bounty program, and the vendor offers up to $2 million to any hacker who reports a vulnerability that bypasses the protections of Lockdown Mode on its devices.

It’s an approach that dovetails perfectly with the Zabbix philosophy of “security first,” and it’s why as 2023 dawned we began working with HackerOne, the world leader in attack resistance management (ARM). ARM blends the security expertise of ethical hackers with asset discovery, continuous assessment, and process enhancement to find and close gaps in the digital attack surface.

Why HackerOne?

We knew from the start that we wanted to create a Zabbix-specific bug bounty program that would challenge the world’s best ethical hackers to find the weak spots in our cybersecurity armor – and let us know about them in time to fix them.

One of the biggest advantages of the HackerOne platform is the broad and diverse community of experts that they can call on. Adding Zabbix to HackerOne’s platform was a golden opportunity to test our security and vulnerabilities on a scale that we’d previously been unable to even imagine.

In contrast to an individual penetration test, which is the “old-school” industry standard security measure and is performed based on a pre-prepared scenario, we knew that HackerOne’s experts could discover vulnerabilities that a run-of-the-mill penetration test would never find.

At the same time, we knew that adding Zabbix to HackerOne was a bold decision that would test our faith in the security of our product. Put simply, teaming up with HackerOne was our way of confirming the quality of Zabbix and our desire to constantly improve it.

Getting started

We’ve known for a long time that HackerOne was the ideal partner for a bug bounty program, given their reputation for innovation and effectiveness. After an initial approach and agreement between HackerOne and Zabbix, it was time to consider what exactly a Zabbix bug bounty program would look like.

It was clear to everyone involved that if the reporting of vulnerabilities was to be meaningful and structured, we needed to develop new workflows that would provide a procedure for processing the received applications and handing them over for development. Another critical step was to register for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, where all vulnerabilities discovered in Zabbix are currently registered.

The results

We’re pleased to report that as with any successful implementation, the numbers speak for themselves:

Data for the period 01.01.2023 – 25.01.2024

Submissions

• Reports submitted: 250
• Reports triaged: 3
• Reports closed as resolved: 16
• Reports rewarded: 19

Rewards

• Total rewards: $17,300.00
• Average reward: $865.00
• Median reward: $500.00

Submissions by severity

• Critical: 29
• High: 65
• Medium, low, none: 108
• Not severe: 48

We were pleasantly surprised at the sheer number of submissions alone – not all 250 submissions were severe or even actionable, but the number shows that our community is taking to the program, spreading the word, and doing their part to help us make sure that Zabbix is as secure as we can possibly make it. The fact that we were able to “squash” several bugs that will now never get a chance to bedevil our users is just the icing on the cake.

The results are impressive, but in keeping with the Zabbix ethos of continuous improvement, we’re confident that with a few refinements we can pay out even more in 2024. After all, any money that goes toward building a better, more secure product is money well spent! We’d like to close by extending a special and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed to our bug bounty program and discovered vulnerabilities – keep up the great work!

 

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HPC Monitoring: Transitioning from Nagios and Ganglia to Zabbix 6

Post Syndicated from Mark Vilensky original https://blog.zabbix.com/hpc-monitoring-transitioning-from-nagios-and-ganglia-to-zabbix-6/27313/

My name is Mark Vilensky, and I’m currently the Scientific Computing Manager at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. I’ve been working in High-Performance Computing (HPC) for the past 15 years.

Our base is at the Chemistry Faculty at the Weizmann Institute, where our HPC activities follow a traditional path — extensive number crunching, classical calculations, and a repertoire that includes handling differential equations. Over the years, we’ve embraced a spectrum of technologies, even working with actual supercomputers like the SGI Altix.

Our setup

As of now, our system boasts nearly 600 compute nodes, collectively wielding about 25,000 cores. The interconnect is Infiniband, and for management, provisioning, and monitoring, we rely on Ethernet. Our storage infrastructure is IBM GPFS on DDN hardware, and job submissions are facilitated through PBS Professional.

We use VMware for the system management. Surprisingly, the team managing this extensive system comprises only three individuals. The hardware landscape features HPE, Dell, and Lenovo servers.

The path to Zabbix

Recent challenges have surfaced in the monitoring domain, prompting considerations for an upgrade to Red Hat 8 or a comparable distribution. Our existing monitoring framework involved Nagios and Ganglia, but they had some severe limitations — Nagios’ lack of scalability and Ganglia’s Python 2 compatibility issues have become apparent.

Exploring alternatives led us to Zabbix, a platform not commonly encountered in supercomputing conferences but embraced by the community. Fortunately, we found a great YouTube channel by Dmitry Lambert that not only gives some recipes for doing things but also provides an overview required for planning, sizing, and avowing future troubles.

Our Zabbix setup resides in a modest VM, sporting 16 CPUs, 32 GB RAM, and three Ethernet interfaces, all operating within the Rocky 8.7 environment. The database relies on PostgreSQL 14 and Timescale DB2 version 2.8, with slight adjustments to the default configurations for history and trend settings.

Getting the job done

The stability of our Zabbix system has been noteworthy, showcasing its ability to automate tasks, particularly in scenarios where nodes are taken offline, prompting Zabbix to initiate maintenance cycles automatically. Beyond conventional monitoring, we’ve tapped into Zabbix’s capabilities for external scripts, querying the PBS server and GPFS server, and even managing specific hardware anomalies.

The Zabbix dashboard has emerged as a comprehensive tool, offering a differentiated approach through host groups. These groups categorize our hosts, differentiating between CPU compute nodes, GPU compute nodes, and infrastructure nodes, allowing tailored alerts based on node types.

Alerting and visualization

Our alerting strategy involves receiving email alerts only for significant disasters, a conscious effort to avoid alert fatigue. The presentation emphasizes the nuanced differences in monitoring compute nodes versus infrastructure nodes, focusing on availability and potential job performance issues for the former and services, memory, and memory leaks for the latter.

The power of visual representations is underscored, with the utilization of heat maps offering quick insights into the cluster’s performance.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, our journey with Zabbix has not only delivered stability and automation but has also provided invaluable insights for optimizing resource utilization. I’d like to express my special appreciation for Andrei Vasilev, a member of our team whose efforts have been instrumental in making the transition to Zabbix.

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2023 in Review: A Bigger, Bolder, and Better Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/2023-in-review-a-bigger-bolder-and-better-zabbix/27272/

It hardly seems possible, but somehow 2023 is already in the rearview mirror. It’s been quite a ride, full of dynamic growth, popular events, new releases, and exciting additions to our global community. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the highlights!

Spreading the word

We radically expanded our slate of events this year in an attempt to spread the good word about the world’s finest open-source monitoring solution and meet our vibrant community. Our efforts took the form of:

• 31 meetings (in locations ranging from Kuala Lumpur to Seoul to Paris)
• 3 forums (in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Mexico City)
• 16 meetups (online and in multiple locations around the globe)
• 5 conferences (in Germany, Benelux, China, Japan, and Latin America)
• Countless exhibitions, trade fairs, and expos from Las Vegas to Tokyo and all points in between

Oh, and one blowout Zabbix Summit in Riga in October!

Building a better product

This year we released Zabbix 6.4, which included many important new features:

• Just-in-time (JIT) user provisioning
• Cause and symptom events
• Instant propagation of configuration changes
• Zero-downtime upgrades
• SNMP discovery/bulk data collection speed and performance improvements
• A new menu layout
• The ability to stream metrics and events from Zabbix to external systems over HTTP
• Template versioning
• A development framework for widget creation
• Optional interfaces for server-originated checks
• Streamlined media type configuration for multiple email service providers

Zabbix 6.4 also comes with many new templates for the most popular vendors and cloud providers, including:

• Microsoft Azure MySQL servers
• Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL servers
• Microsoft Azure virtual machines
• Low-level discovery improvements in AWS by HTTP template
• Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager
• Veeam Backup and Replication
• Cisco Nexus 9000 Series
• BMC Control-M
• Cisco Meraki dashboard
• OS processes by Zabbix agent
• Improvements to filesystem discovery in official Zabbix OS templates

Speaking of templates, since the release of Zabbix 6.0, we have developed 38 new integrations, including:

• 16 application templates
• 4 cloud templates
• 2 database templates
• 6 webhooks
• 2 net templates
• 3 SAN templates
• 5 server templates

Maintaining security

In January, we received an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certificate for information security. The certification stands as proof positive that Zabbix protects all our information within the highest internationally acknowledged security standards and reaffirms our commitment to prioritize information security best practices everywhere within our organization.

February saw us launch a public bug bounty program in partnership with HackerOne, the world’s number one ethical hacker-powered platform. The program’s purpose is to discover potential security vulnerabilities by letting hackers proactively search for and report Zabbix security vulnerabilities and get rewarded for found and validated issues. The program has been a massive success, with 15 reports resolved and $17,800 in bounties being paid out so far.

The power of growth

In 2023 we managed to grow our headcount across every location we operate in, while adding to a growing roster of remote workers from around the world. On March 29, we officially opened a new office in Mexico, joining our offices in Brazil (opened in 2020), the United States (2016), Japan (2012), and Latvia (2005).

To celebrate this momentous occasion, we invited our community of users, partners, and customers to participate in a free and exclusive event dedicated entirely to Zabbix. They were able to learn a little more about the company, ask questions about the plans for the new office, and share knowledge with our team of experts.

Our Integration team also saw significant growth in 2023, which has resulted in a faster rollout of popular templates and integrations as well as higher levels of quality than ever before. The Partners team had a busy year as well, adding 19 new certified partners around the globe and upgrading several others to Premium and Certified Reseller status.

Lending a helping hand

As an open-source company, we champion knowledge sharing and a more open world. It’s why we took part in the career day at the Transport and Telecommunication Institute in Riga, supported the “Youth Has Talent” contest in Latvia organized by the Laiks Jauniešiem association, and sent our Head of Training Kristine Lamberte as a guest speaker to Rezekne Technical School.

Our team in Latin America got in on the action by working with the DEDICATE Foundation to develop the Zabbix Innova Challenge. It’s a free activity that’s designed to promote the development of technological projects that involve young people in Mexico, while boosting the technology community and stimulating the development of creative solutions.

Our goal in showing up at all these events is to encourage young talent, support and invest in local social projects that empower and inspire future generations, share our skills and experience, and showcase some of the amazing career opportunities that Zabbix can offer.

We aim to create a world without interruption, and just as we strive to make the world a better place by building the best monitoring tool possible, we also do what we can to help those around us whose lives have been interrupted by circumstances beyond their control.

In 2023, that involved donating a total of €378,000 to organizations like the Children’s Hospital Foundation, Samaritan International Latvia, The Oncological Patient Support Association “Tree of Life”, the Children’s Foundation of Latvia, the Autism Support Point in Rēzekne, and ziedot.lv.

Getting noticed

The world continued to sit up and take notice of what we’ve been doing in 2023. Brazilian tech journal iMasters started off the year by noting Zabbix LATAM’s incredible 300% growth rate, while another Brazilian journal, Baguete, published an outstanding piece on the opening of the Zabbix office in Mexico.

In May, we were recognized as the top monitoring solution on Peerspot, and July saw us spotlighted in Labs of Latvia, a media platform for tech and innovation, which reported on our global expansion.

October brought with it a wave of favorable press coverage – Zabbix Summit 2023 speaker Dr. Hiroshi Abe had great things to say about us when profiled in El Español, and the same publication also published a well-researched company profile after the Summit.

In addition, Guaratã Almeida, a Zabbix partner and the technology director of the Brazilian city of Maceió, was an enthusiastic4 participant in the Summit, as noted by the city’s website.

Meanwhile, ThinkIT in Japan published an insightful interview with Zabbix Engineers Elina Pulke and Eliza Sekace, plus an inside look at the Summit proceedings.

Belgian website ITdaily followed that up with a post-Summit look at our business model and future plans, while Techzine published a glowing profile of their own as November drew to a close.

The icing on the cake of 2023 was Zabbix being named to the list of the “Top 101 Latvia’s Most Valuable Enterprises in 2023.” It’s a good measure of our significant contribution to Latvia’s economy and a reminder of our increasingly global impact.

Carrying our momentum into 2024

It was a year full of growth and accomplishments, and it was all possible because of our incredible community of customers and contributors! As 2024 approaches, you can look forward to a long list of new upgrades, events, and inspiration. Keep following us on social media, reading our blog, and checking our forum to stay on top of all the latest Zabbix news and events!

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Building a Partner Program: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/building-a-partner-program-the-zabbix-advantage/27164/

At Zabbix, our emphasis on high performance, functionality, and reliability has led to the creation of one of the most popular monitoring solutions on the market. It’s so popular, in fact, that we get near-constant requests for Zabbix professional consulting, advice, support, and training from almost every corner of the world.

That’s why we created the Zabbix Partner Program. Our partner program was designed with one goal in mind – to get our services to the widest possible audience of qualified buyers by allowing customers to purchase them through a network of verified Zabbix partners as well as from Zabbix directly.

Our partners create high value for thousands of customers who would not otherwise enjoy access to Zabbix services by providing complete localization in terms of linguistic and cultural compatibility, availability across time zones, in-person access, and flexibility around currencies and payments.

To do that as effectively as possible, we’ve divided our partners into 3 categories:

Resellers. These are companies that promote and resell Zabbix services. Their job is to locate leads, present and promote Zabbix products and services, consult the leads regarding their ideal solutions, and arrange the contracts. At that point, Zabbix steps in and provides the services. Resellers are a great resource for customers who are limited by local regulations when it comes to buying Zabbix services in their local currency or from companies registered in their own country.

Certified Partners. Certified partners can also promote and resell Zabbix services, but they’re also officially authorized to deliver selected Zabbix services and solutions in their local languages. The ease of access and a common language allows certified partners to stay in close contact with customers. They can also sell their own value-adding services alongside Zabbix services.

Premium Partners. A premium partner has the same authorization as certified partners, but premium partner status is reserved for partners with the highest expertise and experience. Premium partners can participate in highly sophisticated Zabbix implementation, integration, and support projects.

Building a winning partner program has taught us a few things about the process, so without further ado, we’d like to share 6 best practices that we adhere to when it comes to cultivating and expanding our network of partners.

Set realistic goals

Years of running a partner program have taught us that success is impossible without clearly defined goals and success metrics. Setting firm, realistic goals for a program is the only way to measure its effectiveness and ROI. After a few quarters, it should be possible to compare performance to goals and see whether changes need to be made.

Accordingly, we make sure that Zabbix executives, sales teams, and partners are aware that getting a new program up and running (or making changes to an existing program) takes time. Expecting instant results is not realistic – we’ve learned that a ramp-up period of a few months is usually reasonable.

Make expectations clear

Nothing kills momentum faster than confusion. That’s why it’s important to make sure that partners have a solid understanding of everything that’s being asked of them. We’ve learned to give partners concise goals and objectives so that everyone is on the same page. We also create annual business plans for all three partnership programs, review them quarterly, and reward success.

Having the same KPIs as partners is also important. When different metrics for success exist, we run the risk of our partners being less enthusiastic about taking actions that will increase the success of Zabbix but may do less for them. In our experience, it’s better to build partnerships around a joint success target so that when partners win, we win.

Support your partners

At Zabbix, supporting our partners means providing outstanding sales, marketing, and technical support, all of which shows that we’re invested in their success as much as our own. Our partnership team helps partners with all presales-related questions, organizes demo calls, manages the deal registration to protect partner deals, patriciates in joint calls with customers, and helps with all possible legal questions and certifications.

Apart from day-to-day pre-sales support, we organize and participate in joint Zabbix marketing events of different formats together with our partners. These meetups, meetings, conferences, and external events organized by other vendors around the globe are designed to spread the word about Zabbix solutions and services while helping our partners generate new leads. During these events, our partners demonstrate their recent use-cases and serve as experts for the rest of the partner network and the wider Zabbix community.

Build Trust

Trust is the foundation of all partnerships, and we find that our partners trust us because we deliver the support and tools they need to be successful. It’s why we work hard to keep our partners updated with product developments and industry trends, and we continuously educate them on how to sell and overcome roadblocks.

We even allow some of our partners to conduct official Zabbix trainings, provided they have a certified trainer available. When an existing partner wants to become a training partner, we discuss their needs and plan their training certification together.

Measure and monitor

Whether launching a new program or scaling up an existing one, measuring the right key performance indicators (KPIs) can mean the difference between growth and chaos. If a business doesn’t know what to measure and optimize for their partner program, they won’t know what to improve if growth stalls out, and you’ll struggle to explain how partnerships contribute value.

It’s impossible to get far on the road to success without measuring progress along the way. That’s why we review goals and metrics with our partners every quarter, assess what’s working well and what’s missing the mark, and adapt and adjust if needed. We’ve learned not to change things up too often, but we’re always open to making tweaks that will amplify success.

Communicate effectively

One of the most important ingredients of any successful partner program is communication. It’s essential to keep partners informed about new products, promotions, and other important updates. That involves knowing the audience and understanding what each partner type and their respective employees are interested in and when.

A cornerstone of the Zabbix Partner Program is our ability to actively listen to our partners’ feedback. Our experience is that getting ahead of issues and concerns strengthens relationships, maintains trust, and guarantees that our partners feel supported and valued.

Conclusion

Becoming a Zabbix Partner is an ideal way to get recognized by potential customers and increase the visibility of your business, while also getting a leg up on your competitors by using technical support according to a professional service-level agreement.

In addition, you can count on discounts on all Zabbix services, the ability to access pre-sale consulting services, and participation in joint marketing events.

To find out more about our partner program and sign up, visit the Zabbix Partners page.

The post Building a Partner Program: The Zabbix Advantage appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Case of success: phygital environment monitoring with Zabbix

Post Syndicated from Aurea Araujo original https://blog.zabbix.com/case-of-success-phygital-environment-monitoring-with-zabbix/27108/

When retail needs involve monitoring diverse and complex environments, with digital and physical operations, the tool chosen to meet those needs must be versatile, scalable and capable of collecting and analyzing data to generate insights for managers and support decision-making.

With this in mind, Unirede – a Zabbix Premium Partner – developed a use case consisting of monitoring a client in the retail segment, using Zabbix as the main tool for data collection, consolidation and event management.

The result: a reduction of up to 70% in operational costs and other benefits related to data-based decision-making, following the data driven concept and automation at the technological environment level for rapid responses to incidents.

Continue reading to understand, in detail, how monitoring can support retail needs, based on this case of success.

Retail needs

Currently, stores and brands that offer an omnichannel experience are standing out in the market. This means that they are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not only in physical spaces (such as the stores themselves), but also digitally (through e-commerce and mobile app operations). These retailers also have critical operations in distribution centers that operate without interruption.

As a result, the environment to be monitored becomes what we call phygital – both physical and digital, at the same time. This is a concept the origins of which are closely linked to the Internet and global digitalization.

With this, customers can choose to buy from home, on their cell phone, wherever they are. However, if necessary, they can find the support they need in physical stores, with the same rules and prices across all channels.

Therefore, retailers need to ensure that the operation is able to deliver, full-time, a consistent customer experience on any channel, mitigating or preventing unavailability and loss of service performance. Additionally, they need to provide support to requests for help that may arise from managers who are responsible for the company’s results.

And this is not limited to just one type of retail. Segments such as supermarkets, fast fashion, specialists, fast food and pharmaceutical, among others, can benefit from data monitoring to improve the work carried out in activities such as:

  • Understanding the purchasing journey of omnibuyer customers (on-line/off-line):
  • Complete monitoring of user experience;
  • Maximizing the operation of distribution centers;
  • Monitoring points of sale (POS);
  • Developing technical and executive dashboardswith the main KPIs of the business;
  • Reports with information for making decisions in real time.

So, through monitoring with Zabbix, it is possible to collect data from different points, organize these data as information in visual dashboards and generate knowledge to improve internal and external customer service from end to end.

How monitoring with Zabbix works

We talk about the benefits and needs regarding retailers, but we also need to explain how monitoring with Zabbix works in this type of environment.

Beginning with the basics: Zabbix collects, categorizes, analyzes and generates information from data.

This process divided into 4 stages:

  • Data collection;
  • Problem detection;
  • Visualization;
  • Reaction.
Zabbix activity cycle

In the first stage, Zabbix captures data from different sources, which can be cloud systems, containers, networks, servers, databases, APIs, stocks, payment methods, applications, services and the Internet of Things. At this stage, there is a lot of flexibility in the tool itself, and it is also possible to create completely customized collection methods.

The data are encrypted, as Zabbix follows the premise of Security by Design, and they are analyzed in a processing stage to detect possible problems or behaviors that the business wants to be detected.

At this stage, data processing categorizes information into events by severity, indicates the root cause of the potential problem or anomaly, correlates these events based on predefinitions established by system administrators or business managers, begins self-remediation of this problem, and creates predictions based on metrics behaviors so that the business is ready and prepared to deal with events that have not yet occurred.

Afterwards, the information generated is allocated to dashboards for better visualization and, consequently, administrators choose how to react to what is shown.

Reactions can take the form of alerts via message, e-mail and applications, by generating tickets to the support team, by establishing a connection to other applications and systems, and by automating problem solving – or self-healing.

Main on-line and off-line retail indicators

By monitoring systems and the main resources of the retail environment, in addition to ensuring better availability and performance, it is possible to extract critical indicators for your business in real time.

There are indicators that are found both in physical and digital retail operations. With Zabbix, it is possible to collect and measure each one of these indicators, such as:

  • Gross sales;
  • Average ticket;
  • Sales by product category;
  • Sales by payment method;
  • Number of sales;
  • Accumulated sales in a given period;
  • Inventory value;
  • Sales by M2;
  • Sales by collaborator;
  • Year-over-Year Sales (YoY);
  • Goals achieved;
  • Conversion rate (from visitor to customer);
  • Traffic origin channels;
  • Time spent in e-commerce;
  • New visitors vs. returning visitors;
  • Cart abandonment.

By analyzing the elements mentioned above, also through monitoring, it is possible to understand how the performance of on-line sales is compared to off-line sales, helping business owners to make a decision on which of the means – or all of them – should receive more or less investments to generate more revenue.

We mentioned automating manual processes not long ago.

In retail, this can happen with the discovery of events and the indication of root causes, such as identifying the unavailability of a service or component that impacts the proper operation of a given system and, based on rules defined in Zabbix, triggering a self-recovery command, without human intervention, as in the following example:

Example of self-healing with Zabbix, used by Unirede.

What are the benefits of monitoring for retailers?

How can monitoring become essential for the digital transformation of retailers?

In order to do this, we need to understand the benefits of collecting and analyzing data with Zabbix.

The first and most objective one is the monitoring of support services, both in physical and digital operations. Here, we are talking about networks, connections, and IT infrastructure in general.

But there is also monitoring distribution centers in order to optimize supply chains, and capturing data from stores, points of sale, data centers and clouds.

With this duly adjusted, we move on to how the monitoring and sustainment of basic services helps retailers to have a better view of environments, analyzing performance indicators in real time and managing SLAs.

The result of a monitoring system with Zabbix in retail is having operations focused on customer experience, ensuring cost reductions and gains in operational efficiency.

Lessons learned from retailer monitoring

With so many possibilities and advantages resulting from using Zabbix in retail, it is difficult to choose where to start.

We need to bear in mind that, when implementing Zabbix in this area, it is important to focus on what is essential, that is, monitoring only what is necessary, instead of monitoring data that will not result in any type of action or analysis in case of an event. Avoid standard templates without the necessary adjustments to meet the specificities of your environment and the analysis practices your business requires..

Automating as much as possible is also a crucial practice, as it allows the team to dedicate more time to strategic activities in the area, thus spending less time dealing with incidents and adding new hosts.

And, of course, even if it is possible to have an integration with other tools, it is worth carrying out a thorough review of existing monitoring efforts in other tools to avoid generating events that are irrelevant, that is, that do not require any type of action by the team. This approach ensures that integration is smooth and does not compromise the effectiveness of the system and operations by generating excessive or unnecessary events.

Last but not least: it is important to recognize the essential and crucial role of the people who use the tool. They not only operate Zabbix, but also play an active role in the development and continuous evolution of business monitoring efforts.

By giving these users a voice and promoting training sessions, your company can invest in more meaningful collaborations, contributing to the continuous adaptation of Zabbix to the specific needs of the retail segment.

About Unirede

Unirede is a technology company, with roots in the State of Rio Grande do Sul and headquartered in Porto Alegre. It was created in 1999 and is dedicated to provide its clients with effective consulting services to improve business performance. Its activities aim to increase productivity, minimize downtime and drive the integration of technological innovations through managed services.

With a philosophy centered on simplicity, Unirede focuses on human relationships, both internally and with clients. There is a conscious effort to not only provide services, but also to establish relationships, favoring the delivery of intelligent solutions that add value to clients.

Unirede has achieved a level of excellence and commitment to results that has resulted in the establishment of strategic partnerships with technology market leaders. It stands out as the first Zabbix Premium Partner in Latin America, since 2008, and was the first Zabbix Training Partner in the world, in 2012.

➜ Find out more about the Official Zabbix Partner Program.

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Training and Skills Development: The Zabbix Advantage

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/training-and-skills-development-the-zabbix-advantage/26873/

At Zabbix, we know that we’ve developed a competitive product. We know it’s very likely the best on the market. Millions of satisfied customers around the world download and use it every day. But that’s not where the story ends.

It’s critical to us that our customers know how to use our product to its full potential in order to get the most value out of it. That’s why we take ongoing training and skills development so seriously, and why we work hard to equip our users with knowledge that’s designed to increase their productivity and performance.

We’ve got years of experience seeing what works and doesn’t work when it comes to showing our users how to get the most out of Zabbix. We’ve learned how to make complicated concepts simple, how to adjust to a wide variety of cultures and learning styles, and how to build courses that create happier, more productive, and more satisfied users.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve identified as 5 of our best training and development practices, and how they help to make sure that the information we present in our training sessions sticks with our users and helps them get as much value from Zabbix as they possibly can.

Perform an effective training and skills development needs analysis

Quality training and skills development begins with a needs analysis. This is a process that organizations use to determine the gap between the current and desired knowledge, skills, and abilities of end users. It typically involves determining the root cause for a training request, identifying the needed outcomes, and uncovering the best learning approach.

An effective needs analysis addresses questions like these:

  • Which of our users need training the most?
  • What kind of training do they require?
  • How can we best design an effective training program for them?
  • What will be the impact of training on their experience with Zabbix?
  • What level of investment and resources will be required to implement an effective training program for them?

At Zabbix, we ask ourselves these questions and many others before creating new training courses or modifying existing ones. We take into account our users’ backgrounds, including their education and work experience. We are always trying to speak to their experiences and offer content in a language that’s easy for them to understand. Our ultimate goal is to make our training sessions feel relevant to everyone, no matter their level of Zabbix experience.

Once we know who we’re speaking to, we can identify the areas where users may be struggling. We focus on what our users are motivated by and what tasks they seem to stumble over the most, and we know that showing users how our training can positively impact their careers will go a long way toward creating a receptive audience for the information we’re presenting.

Build targeted and customized courses

There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to training and skills development. As the world and technology change, knowing which training methods to implement can be a challenge. Businesses, educators, and learners all have unique learning approaches, and tailoring a custom training program creates balance for effective learning experiences.

The Zabbix method is to create a different course for every skill level and potential user of our services, creating an official Zabbix certified training path that guides our users toward the goal of becoming a Zabbix certified expert.

We start by making sure we’ve clearly identified our target audience, so that we can create content that’s relevant and engaging. For example, in our Zabbix Certified Expert and Zabbix Certified Professional courses, we know that users already have a baseline of knowledge, so we don’t need to provide a lot of background or general information. Understanding our audience helps us keep the content concise and to the point.

From there, we focus on structuring our content. For us, this means keeping training and development focused on a single skill level and keeping content short and to the point. Once we have our “big picture” outline, we work with our trainers to plan out the format, key takeaways, and activities.

That brings us to our final point –providing a truly hands-on experience. We know that it’s critical for learners to be able to quickly apply what they’ve been taught, so we include at least one activity per section of a course, allowing learners to put their new skills to the test by performing practical tasks and solving real-life use cases. This approach is borne out by the fact that our labs are consistently rated by students as among their favorite aspects of the training experience.

Provide quality, professional materials

Experience shows that it’s vitally important to focus on providing training materials that are:

  • Professional in appearance AND user-friendly
  • Available before, during, and after class to reinforce the learning process
  • Aligned with the course objectives
  • Easy to access (including print or online options)

Every student who attends a Zabbix course gets the course presentation as well as the lab manual containing the practical tasks and their solutions. When it comes to the presentation, we go to great lengths to make sure we know our learners and write for them, using accessible, approachable language and keeping things simple and to the point at all times.

Have qualified and experienced instructors

Most people don’t recall a lot of details from specific lectures they attended in high school, but it’s very likely that they remember the name of their favorite teacher. Instructors have a massive impact on how adults learn as well.

Effective trainers continuously practice and develop qualities that improve their understanding of what learners and organizations need. They understand that the more they exercise these qualities, the better equipped they’ll be to deliver engaging trainings that create an active learning atmosphere and incorporate current learning trends.

Every Zabbix Certified trainer works with the tool on a daily basis, so they’ve got plenty of hands-on use cases, hacks, workarounds, and shortcuts to share. They understand that a quality training session is a continuous feedback loop between learners and an instructor, so they listen actively and encourage engagement through the use of activities and Q&A sessions throughout our courses.

In addition to their demonstrated knowledge of all things Zabbix, our trainers also bring to the table strong interpersonal skills and a passion for what they do. That’s why nearly all the feedback we receive highlights the expertise and professionalism of our trainers as a high point of the training experience.

Assess training and skills development effectiveness

Training effectiveness measures the impact of training on a learner’s knowledge, skills, and performance. It needs to measure not only what employees learn but how they apply it in their jobs. It should also determine whether the training truly benefits users, while uncovering any issues in the training process that need to be improved.

Zabbix takes a two-track approach to measuring the effectiveness of training and skills development. We incorporate assessments into all our training courses and ask for feedback post-session to help us understand what each user learned, but we also depend on a system of certifications that are backed up by exams.

A Zabbix certification is our guarantee that a certificate holder has mastered the theoretical and practical skills covered during a course. Participants must score 80% or higher to pass any exam, which is why they stand as concrete proof that a certificate holder has the required knowledge to understand the concepts presented in a training session and implement them in real Zabbix environments.

Conclusion

Zabbix has a wide variety of users, so we need to offer a wide variety of courses to meet their needs. Our training programs are intended for IT administrators, auditors, system integrators, and anyone else who deals with IT infrastructure monitoring.

We’re proud of the fact that even veteran administrators with several years of Zabbix experience come away from our trainings armed with inside knowledge of new features and best practices.
To find out more about our comprehensive suite of trainings and find the one that’s right for you or your organization, visit zabbix.com/training.

 

 

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The Zabbix Advantage for Business

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/the-zabbix-advantage-for-business/26497/

CIOs and CITOs know all too well that a smoothly functioning network is the backbone of any business. Your network has to guarantee reliability, performance, and security. An unreliable network, by contrast, means damaged productivity, negative customer perceptions, and haphazard security. The solution is network monitoring, and in this post we’ll explore the reasons why Zabbix is the ideal monitoring solution for any business.

What is network monitoring?

Network monitoring is a critical IT process where all networking components (as well as key performance indicators like CPU utilization and network bandwidth) are constantly monitored to improve performance and eliminate bottlenecks. It provides real-time information that network administrators need to determine whether a network is running optimally.

Why Zabbix?

At Zabbix, we’re here to help you deliver for your customers, flawlessly and without interruptions. Our monitoring solution is 100% open source, available in over 20 languages, and able to collect an unlimited amount of data. Designed with enterprise requirements in mind, Zabbix provides a comprehensive, “single pane of glass” view of any size environment. Put simply, Zabbix allows you to monitor anything – from physical and virtual servers or containers to network infrastructure, applications, and cloud services.

What’s more, we offer a wide variety of additional professional services to go along with our solution, including:

  • Multiple technical support subscriptions that are tailored to the needs of your business
  • Certified training programs that are designed to help you master Zabbix under the guidance of top experts
  • A wide range of professional services, including template building, upgrades, consulting, and more

Keep reading to find out more about the difference Zabbix can make for your business.

The Zabbix advantage

IT teams are under enormous pressure to have their networks functioning perfectly 100% of the time, and with good reason. It’s simply not possible to run a business with a malfunctioning network. Here are 5 key reasons why you need to make network monitoring a top priority, and why Zabbix is the right answer for all of them.

Reliability

A network monitoring solution’s main reason for being is to show whether a device is working or not. Taking a proactive approach to maintaining a healthy network will keep tech support requests and downtime to an absolute minimum. Zabbix makes it easy to do so by automatically detecting problem states in your metric flow. Not only that, but our automated predictive functions can also help you react proactively. They do this by forecasting a value for early alerting and predicting the time left until you reach a problem threshold. Automation then allows you to remove additional inefficiencies.

Visibility

Having complete visibility of all your hardware and software assets allows you to easily monitor the health of your network. Zabbix lets businesses access metrics, issues, reports, and maps with a single click, allowing you to:

  • Analyze and correlate your metrics with easy-to-read graphs
  • Track your monitoring targets on an interactive geo-map
  • Display the statuses of your elements together with real-time data to get a detailed overview of your infrastructure on a Zabbix map
  • Generate scheduled PDF reports from any Zabbix dashboard
  • Extend the native Zabbix frontend functionality by developing your own frontend widgets and modules

Performance

By making it easy to monitor anything, Zabbix lets you know which parts of your network are being properly used, overused, or underused. This can help you uncover unnecessary costs that can be eliminated or identify a network component that needs upgrading.

Compliance

Today’s IT teams need to meet strict regulatory and protection standards in increasingly complex networks. Zabbix can spot changes in normal system behavior and unusual data flow. It can then either leverage multiple messaging channels to notify your team about anomalies or simply resolve any issues automatically.

Profitability

Zabbix has an extensive track record of making businesses more productive by saving network management time and lowering operating costs. Servers, for example, are machines that inevitably break down from time to time. Being able to quickly re-launch after a failure has occurred and minimizing the server downtime are vital. By making sure your team is aware of any and all current and impending issues, Zabbix can reduce downtime and increase the productivity and efficiency of your business.

Zabbix across industries

Whatever field you’re in, there’s no substitute for consistent, problem-free service when it comes to gaining the trust and loyalty of customers. Zabbix has an extensive track record of helping clients in multiple industries achieve their goals.

Zabbix for healthcare

A typical hospital relies on tens of thousands of connected devices. Manually checking each one for anomalies simply isn’t practical. Establishing a stable service level is a vital issue in most industries, but in healthcare it’s literally a matter of life and death. With Zabbix, hospital IT teams receive potentially life-saving alerts if anything is out of the ordinary.

What’s more, Zabbix can monitor progress toward expected outcomes, providing up-to-the-minute statistics on data errors or IT system failures. Issues, response times, and potential bottlenecks are displayed in easy-to-read graphs and charts. This allows hospital staff to follow up on the presence or absence of problems.

Zabbix for banking and finance

Financial institutions of all sizes rely on their networks to maintain connectivity and productivity. By processing millions of checks per minute and considering very complex dependencies between different elements of infrastructure, Zabbix allows banks to proactively detect and resolve network problems before they turn into major business disruptions.

Zabbix is also designed to seamlessly connect distributed architecture, including remote offices, branches, and even individual ATMs. Some of our financial industry clients previously used up to 20 different monitoring tools. Each alert sent hundreds of emails to different people, making it impossible to effectively monitor the environment. Naturally, they found Zabbix’s ability to monitor many thousands of devices and “single pane of glass” view to be a significant upgrade.

Zabbix for education

In an age of digital course materials and resources, schools and universities can’t operate without functioning IT infrastructures. Our clients in education typically have heterogeneous infrastructures with thousands of servers and clients. They also possess all kinds of connected devices, dozens of different operating systems, multiple locations, and hundreds of IT staff.

Zabbix has proven itself to be a simple, cost-effective method of monitoring geographically distributed campuses and educational sites. We’ve done this by:

  • Providing early notification of possible viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other transmitters of system infection
  • Monitoring IT systems for intellectual property (IP) protection purposes
  • Saving human resources by reducing manual work

Zabbix for government

Network monitoring is critical for government agencies, as downtime can bring a halt to vital public services. Our public-sector clients range from city-wide public transportation companies all the way up to entire prefectures. They use Zabbix to monitor the availability of utilities, transport, lighting, and many other public services.

In the process, Zabbix increases the effectiveness of budget expenditures by providing precise and accountable data on how public resources are used. This makes it easier to justify further expenditures. In most business software, agents are required for each monitored host and costs increase in proportion to the number of monitored hosts. By contrast, Zabbix is open source and the software itself is free of charge, resulting in anticipated cost reductions of up to 25% in many cases.

Zabbix for retail

Retail environments increasingly depend on network-connected equipment, particularly when it comes to warehouse monitoring and tracking SKUs (stock keeping units). Zabbix delivers an all-in-one tool to monitor different applications, metrics, processes, and equipment while providing a complete picture about the availability and performance of all the components that make a retail business successful. This makes it possible for retailers to easily automate store openings and closings, monitor cash machines, and keep track of access system log entries.

Not only that, the quantity and quality of information that Zabbix collects makes it easy for retailers to conduct a more accurate analysis of what is happening (or what may happen) and take preventive measures. Our retail clients find that having this level of control over their resources and services increases the confidence of their teams as well as their customers.

Zabbix for telecom

Internet, telephony, and television verticals require availability and consistency. The key to success is providing your services 24/7/365.

Zabbix makes this possible by providing full visibility of all network and customer devices, allowing operators to know of any outage before customers do and take necessary actions. Some of our telecommunications clients are able to effortlessly monitor well over 100,000 devices with a single Zabbix server. This helps them improve the customer experience and driving growth in the process.

Zabbix for aerospace

In the aerospace industry, timely data delivery and issue notification are the keys to safe operations. Aircraft depend on complex electronic systems that can diagnose the slightest deviations and make malfunctions known. Unfortunately, this is often in the form of either an indicator light on an instrument panel or a log message that is accessible only with specialized software or tools.

With Zabbix, all data transfers from the aircraft’s diagnostic system to the responsible employees can happen automatically. Error prioritization and escalation to further levels can also happen automatically if any aircraft has an ongoing issue that remains active for multiple days.

Conclusion

At Zabbix, our goal is a world without interruptions, powered by a world-class universal monitoring solution that’s available and affordable to any business. Our open-source software allows you to monitor your entire IT stack, no matter what size your infrastructure is or where it’s hosted.

That’s why government institutions across the globe as well as some of the world’s largest companies trust us with their network monitoring needs.

Get in touch with us to learn more and get started on the path to maximum efficiency and uptime today!

 

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Leveraging Telegram as a User Interface for Zabbix with Sven Putteneers

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/leveraging-telegram-as-a-user-interface-for-zabbix-with-sven-putteneers/26604/

One of the highlights of any Zabbix Summit is the diverse set of fascinating speakers who show up each year. With that in mind, we’re continuing our series of interviews with Summit 2023 speakers by sitting down with 7 to 7 CEO Sven Putteneers, who has been gracious enough to fill us in on his work, his Zabbix experience, and the details of integrating Zabbix with the popular messaging app Telegram.

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.

I’m a 43-year-old computer geek with a strong interest in Open Source software and programming. I work for a big telco, where I help to build and maintain a cloud telephony platform. Apart from that, I administer our Zabbix installation, which we have set up as a multi-tenant platform and which we use to provide a “monitoring as a service” offering to our customers. Aside from my day job, I founded a company (7 to 7), where Zabbix consultancy is part of the services I offer.

How long have you been using Zabbix? What kind of daily Zabbix tasks are you involved in at your company?

I have been using Zabbix daily for the last 7+ years. My daily tasks are configuring new customers and hosts, maintaining our Zabbix deployment, programming integrations with external systems, and thinking about how we can improve our Zabbix installation in any way.

For my side job, I give Zabbix-related advice, help customers solve tough Zabbix problems (e.g. “how to monitor this exotic device”) and roll out Zabbix installations from scratch to a fully functional monitoring platform. I also offer monitoring in an MSP-like fashion for customers who want their infrastructure monitored but don’t want to deploy their own Zabbix.

Can you give us a sneak peek at what we can expect to hear during your Zabbix Summit speech?

I’ll describe how a Telegram bot that is connected to your Zabbix deployment can turn your Telegram app into a small but powerful user interface for your Zabbix. This means not just using Telegram as a one-directional notification mechanism (like email), but allowing you to query your Zabbix, perform actions (like acknowledging alarms), fetch graphs, etc.

Why did you decide to write a bot for Telegram as opposed to other popular messaging systems? Was it simply a matter of preference or were technical considerations taken into account?

Preference was only a factor after we made a first selection based purely on technical criteria. Some of the criteria we had were that it had to be multi-platform (our Zabbix users are on Android as well as on iOS and use Mac, Windows, and Linux on their computers), it preferably had built-in platform support for bots, and the option of sending more than just plain text.

Telegram ticked all the boxes and has some nice extra features that were not hard requirements (like in-place updating of already sent messages instead of just being able to send new messages), so we decided to go with that.

Have you written any other custom integrations for Zabbix?

Yes, but most of these are for internal systems (like our in-house CRM) and are not really interesting outside the company.

I have written some integrations for monitoring (i.e. UserParameter scripts and external scripts -scripts + the accompanying templates) to monitor systems that have an API that is difficult to query with vanilla Zabbix. An example would be TLS certificate monitoring that is a bit more in-depth than what Agent2 currently offers.

I have also fixed some bugs in a script called mib2zabbix, which as the name suggests takes an MIB file as input and outputs a template file that can be imported in Zabbix.
There are a few features I still want to add to the script (like generating the new walk items for efficient SNMP value gathering), but the script as it is has saved us a tremendous amount of time already.

One fun (and useful!) thing I wrote is a script that uses zabbix_sender to feed data to a “fake host” representing all the things we monitor (think of it as an item per monitored host). Because our Zabbix is multi-tenant, we have some naming conventions and rules around mandatory hostgroup membership to control where alarms for a specific host (or trigger) get sent and when.

I did a talk about how we use hostgroups to control action logic at the Zabbix Benelux Conference 2020 (and the same talk again at the Online Meetup in September 2020. The “fake host” alerts us when a host doesn’t conform to our conventions or is misconfigured, so alarm notifications would be prevented from being sent, for example.

The cool thing is that since this is all based on discovery rules and a script that pulls everything from Zabbix through the API and then feeds data about potential problems back through zabbix_sender, new hosts are picked up automatically and are checked for compliance with our conventions within minutes after they’ve been added.

 

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Simplifying Digital Transformation with Marianna Portela

Post Syndicated from Michael Kammer original https://blog.zabbix.com/simplifying-digital-transformation-with-marianna-portela/26609/

To help everyone in our community get up to speed with Zabbix Summit speakers and their topics, we’re continuing our series of interviews and sitting down for a chat with Marianna Portela of Brazilian mass media conglomerate Globo. Read on to get a preview of her Summit speech topic and see how she uses Zabbix to bring massive live events to millions of users around the globe.

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.

I’m a tech lead at Globo, the largest media group in Latin America. It includes over-the-air broadcasting, television and film production, a pay television subscription service, streaming media, publishing, and online services.

How long have you been using Zabbix? What kind of daily Zabbix tasks are you involved in at your company?

I have been working at Globo for 15 years. I’ve been involved in monitoring for 11 of those years, and I’ve been using Zabbix for 10. I help monitor the applications that generate data for live events, and I use Zabbix to generate metrics that support decision-making related to better content delivery quality.

Can you name a few of the specific challenges that Zabbix has helped you solve?

Zabbix allows us to empower our users and supports our entire digital transformation – including many things related to Globoplay streaming. It also helps us monitor live event infrastructure, like the Olympics and World Cup. Previously, when there were technical issues during live events, we would try to figure out what happened after the fact, but no longer – Zabbix gives us a proactive analysis of potential occurrences within live production.

Can you give us a sneak peek at what we can expect to hear during your Zabbix Summit speech?

I’m planning to talk about how we use Zabbix to help ensure the quality monitoring of live production, which is essentially the production and the part of Globo that deals with any type of live event and generates data for things like games, for example. I’ll introduce how we started with actual infrastructure monitoring and how this digital transformation at Globo began, specifically how we managed to enter new areas like content generation, especially live content. Then I’ll also discuss some specifics of how we monitor live event infrastructure.

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