Tag Archives: Zabbix alerts

What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix the Storyteller

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-zabbix-the-storyteller/24629/

Can you create fairy tales with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and do some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my blog about this project.

We all know how Zabbix has a never-ending list of integrations for just about everything — need to integrate it with OpsGenie, PagerDuty, Teams, Slack, or something else? No problem, there’s probably a ready-made integration for that already.

But, based on questions I’ve received over the years at work, not everyone realizes how utterly powerful the alert message templating engine is for you to create custom messages with the help of built-in macros and of course the user macros you can define. The default Zabbix HTML e-mail message template is very compact in its format, and for me easy to read, but years ago someone at work told me that the alerts were not easy for him to follow.

What I did back then was that I created an alert template of my own, which tells about the events in a bit different format, here’s a short snippet from those alerts.

Fairy tale time!

Now that at home we have our almost-three-months-old-baby, I’m using her as the perfect excuse to make Zabbix alerts to be like fairy tales. You know the drill. Your kiddo wants to hear yet another story before he or she falls asleep, and you have already run out of fresh stories to read.

What if your Zabbix would generate fairy tales for you? Well, not really, but at least the following would make the stories a bit more amusing to you and very confusing to your kid.

Let’s first create a new media type via Zabbix Administration –> Media types. For this, I just cloned the default HTML e-mail media type and gave it a name.

And then, my fantastic story template looks like this:

Add the template to user media type

Next, to actually receive these alerts, you need to configure your user profile and in its media types add the new media type.

Using the template

Getting the new template into use is easy; just go to Zabbix Configuration –> Actions and create a new trigger action with whatever conditions you like.

And then on Operations tab make Zabbix send the alerts via your new fairy tale media type.

The alert e-mail

So this is how the e-mail looks like.

Now go and add some CSS, pictures, whatever you like to your stories. And, perhaps, unlike me, go and change the {ITEM.DESCRIPTION} macro to contain also some instructions what to do with the alert, like at our custom alerts at work I have a tendency to add some hints about how to resolve the issue.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and I would have many stories to tell you about all these years. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix the Storyteller appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Don’t Forget the Facial Cream

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-dont-forget-the-facial-cream/21063/

Can you monitor the regular use of facial cream with Zabbix? Of course, you can! Here’s how. This same method could be very useful for monitoring if the elderly remember to take their meds or so.

What the heck?

A little background story. My forehead has a tendency for dry skin, so I should be using facial cream daily. Of course, as a man, I can guarantee you that 100% of the days I remember to use the cream, I apply it, so in practice, this means about 40-50% hit ratio.

As lately I have been adding more monitored targets to my home Zabbix, one night my wife probably thought she was being snarky or funny when she said “One monitor I could happily receive data about would be how often you remember to use your facial cream.”

A monitoring nerd does not take such ideas lightly.

Howdy door sensor, would you like to do some work?

I found a spare magnetic door sensor and a handy box where to store the cream.

You can see where this is going. This totally beautiful prototype of my Facial Cream Smart Storage Box is now deployed to test. If I open or close the box, the door sensor status changes, thus the facial cream mercy countdown timer resets.

How does it work? And does it really work?

Cozify smart IoT hub is keeping an eye on the magnetic door sensor’s last status change. And look, that awesome brown tape does not bother the magnets at all, Cozify reported the status as changed.

Now that I got the Cozify part working, my Zabbix can then receive the last change time as in Unix time.

On my Grafana, there’s now this absolutely gorgeous new panel, converting the Unix time to the “How long ago the last event happened?” indicator.

So the dashboard part is now working. But that is not all we need to do.

Alerting and escalation

Dashboards and monitoring are not useful at all if proper alerts are not being sent out. I now have this new alert trigger action rule in place.

In other words, if I forget to apply the facial cream, I have a one-hour time window to apply it, or otherwise, the alert gets escalated to my wife.

Will this method work? Is my prototype box reliable? I will tell you next time.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and never get tired of finding out new areas to monitor. — Janne Pikkarainen

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What’s Up, Home? – Use the Zabbix, Luke

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-use-the-zabbix-luke/20953/

Welcome to my weekly blog about how I monitor my home with Zabbix. Like Batman, I have a casual day job as a monitoring tech lead, and by night I tinker around with my home Zabbix. (Except that Batman does not do monitoring, or who knows.)

Anyone using Zabbix knows how it can gather data from just about anywhere, and it can send its alerts to just about anything — pager systems like PagerDuty or OpsGenie, ticketing systems like Jira, e-mail, SMS, etc. Integrating with those takes minutes, is officially supported, very well documented, and would not make sense at home. But, what if at home I would like to show any possible alerts in a completely different way?

Zabbix, meet Star Wars

So, if I want to integrate my Zabbix with a screen saver, how would that work? And how long would that take? Is it even possible?

My friend, in the case of the good old xscreensaver you have many, many options. For its text-based screen saver modules, you can feed it a text file, or an URL from where it downloads the text to show on the screen. Making xscreensaver contents dynamic is easy.

For Zabbix, to make it send its alerts as text, you have many options. At least:

  1. Configure an action that runs whatever command to save the alert to a text file; even echo would do
  2. Let your Other System fetch the alerts over Zabbix API
  3. Let your Other System fetch the alerts directly from the Zabbix database
  4. Send out your alerts as e-mails and let your Other System parse those e-mails
  5. Configure a new custom media type to do something
  6. Use Zabbix real-time export functionality
Internals of my xscreensaver showcase

For this exercise, I decided to use the sixth option: Zabbix real-time export functionality.

What’s that, you ask?

It makes Zabbix save history, trends and/or triggers to JSON files, which any 3rd party program can then parse and utilize. Enabling it happens in practice by commenting out three lines in the Zabbix server config file, altering the path where you want the JSON files to be created, deciding the maximum size of the created files, and what kind of events you want to export. Restart the Zabbix server process, done.

My Zabbix is now running on Raspberry Pi 4. Then, I have a FreeBSD laptop for anything nerdy I want to do, and the FreeBSD laptop has xscreensaver for this demonstration.

So, my FreeBSD laptop does rsync the JSON files from Zabbix server every minute, extracts the event host name and trigger name using jq, and saves the output to text file. Surround that with header and footer text files, and you are done.

Now every time I don’t touch my FreeBSD laptop in a while, it turns on its screensaver and shows me the recent Zabbix alerts. Zabbix, meet Star Wars.

For now, the alert format shown on scroller is not perfect, but it works and took three or four lines of bash in total to accomplish. That’s easy, and in total took maybe 15 minutes to implement to its current stage.

Other news about my home monitoring project
  • My facial cream usage monitoring is going great! I have not missed applying my facial cream even once — I mean, I have received alerts from Zabbix, but each and every time I have then proceeded to apply the cream and my wife has received zero alerts so far. Good boy, me! (Read more about this project next week!)
  • As the trains stopping at our station are not always reliable (they can be either very late or canceled), I now have a live map showing the real-time status of the trains we are interested in. This part actually does not have anything to do with Zabbix at the moment, it’s Grafana and its GraphQL plugin querying data from an official train traffic open data system.
  • Zabbix 6.0 gained a new official weather template, so I now have a local weather dashboard as well provided by Zabbix.
  • I made a “home status shown as emojis” dashboard to make monitoring fun(?) and interesting(?) for the whole family — now our home status can be observed from our living room TV easily.

Some screenshots are below:

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and never get bored of showing the alerts in new ways. — Janne Pikkarainen

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