Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials

Andrea Dalle Vacche, Stefano Kewan Lee

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784399764
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Computernetzwerke

Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials

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Table of Contents

Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Installing a Distributed Zabbix Setup

Zabbix architectures

Understanding Zabbix data flow

Understanding the Zabbix proxies' data flow

Installing Zabbix

Installing from packages

Setting up a Zabbix agent

Creating a Zabbix agent package with CheckInstall

Server configuration

Installing a database

Considering the database size

MySQL partitioning

Installing a Zabbix proxy

Installing the WebGUI interface

Summary

2. Active Monitoring of Your Devices

Understanding Zabbix hosts

Hosts and host groups

Host interfaces

Host inventory

Going beyond Zabbix agents

Simple checks

Keeping SNMP simple

Getting SNMP data into Zabbix

Finding the right OIDs to monitor

Mapping SNMP OIDs to Zabbix items

Getting data types right

SNMP traps

Snmptrapd

Transforming a trap into a Zabbix item

Getting netflow from the devices to the monitoring server

Receiving netflow data on your server

Monitoring a log file with Zabbix

Summary

3. Monitoring Your Network Services

Monitoring the DNS

DNS – response time

DNSSEC – monitoring the zone rollover

Apache monitoring

NTP monitoring

NTP – what are we monitoring?

Squid monitoring

Summary

4. Discovering Your Network

Finding hosts the Zabbix way

Defining action conditions

Choosing action operations

Remote commands

Low-level discovery

Summary

5. Visualizing Your Topology with Maps and Graphs

Creating custom graphs

Maps – a quick setup for a large topology

Maps – automating the DOT creation

Drafting Zabbix maps from DOT

Putting everything together with screens

Summary

A. Partitioning the Zabbix Database

MySQL partitioning

The partition_maintenance procedure

The partition_create procedure

The partition_verify procedure

The partition_drop procedure

The partition_maintenance_all procedure

Housekeeping configuration

B. Collecting Squid Metrics

Squid metric script

Index

Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

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First published: February 2015

Production reference: 1210215

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-976-4

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Authors

Andrea Dalle Vacche

Stefano Kewan Lee

Reviewers

Ravi Bhure

Nicholas Pier

Nicola Volpini

Commissioning Editor

Amarabha Banerjee

Acquisition Editor

Nikhil Karkal

Content Development Editor

Siddhesh Salvi

Technical Editor

Humera Shaikh

Copy Editor

Sarang Chari

Project Coordinator

Kranti Berde

Proofreaders

Simran Bhogal

Linda Morris

Indexer

Hemangini Bari

Graphics

Disha Haria

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Authors

Andrea Dalle Vacche is a highly skilled IT professional with over 14 years of experience in the IT industry and banking. He graduated from Università degli Studi di Ferrara with an information technology certification. This laid the technology foundation that Andrea has built on ever since. Andrea has acquired various industry-respected accreditations, which include Cisco, Oracle, RHCE, ITIL, and of course, Zabbix. Throughout his career, he has worked in many large-scale environments, often in roles that have been very complex, on a consultant basis. This has further enhanced his growing skill set, adding to his practical knowledge base and increasing his appetite for theoretical technical studying.

Andrea's love for Zabbix came from his time spent in the Oracle world as a database administrator/developer. His time was spent mainly on reducing ownership costs, specializing in monitoring and automation. This is where he came across Zabbix and the flexibility it offered, both technically and administratively. With this as a launch pad, Andrea was inspired to develop Orabbix, the first open source software to monitor Oracle's complete integration with Zabbix. He has published a number of articles on Zabbix-related software, such as DBforBIX. His projects are publicly available at http://www.smartmarmot.com. Currently, Andrea is working as a senior architect for a leading global investment bank in a very diverse and challenging environment. He deals with many aspects of the Unix/Linux platforms as well as many types of third-party software, which are strategically aligned to the bank's technical roadmap. In addition to this title, Andrea Dalle Vacche is a coauthor of Mastering Zabbix, Packt Publishing.

Stefano Kewan Lee is an IT consultant with more than 12 years of experience in system integration, security, and administration. He is a certified Zabbix specialist in large environments holds a Linux administration certification from the LPI and a GIAC GCFW certification from SANS Institute. When he's not busy breaking websites, he lives in the countryside with his two cats and two dogs and practices martial arts. In addition to this title, Stefano Kewan Lee is a coauthor of Mastering Zabbix, Packt Publishing.

About the Reviewers

Ravi Bhure is basically an IT engineer with niche skills, such as Chef, Cloud Ansible, SaltStack, Python, Ruby, and Shell/Bash. He also writes code for infrastructure, daily IT operations, and so on. In short, he is fond of using his skills and knowledge of fault-tolerant solutions for the day-to-day maintenance of mission-critical production infrastructure.

Ravi started interacting with computers since 1996 when he got his first computer at home. Things changed very fast, and in 1998, he entered the magical world of the Internet ☺ for the first time ever, which changed his life! He started his own cyber cafe in 1999. In 2004, he got his first job as ...