Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook

Explore the new features of Zabbix 6 for designing, building, and maintaining your Zabbix setup, 2nd Edition

Nathan Liefting, Brian van Baekel

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781803242842
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

Discover practical recipes to help you efficiently monitor enterprise IT infrastructure for Microsoft Windows, Linux, networking, and more

Key Features

• Find out how you can leverage some of the most exciting features of Zabbix 6
• Perform professional IT infrastructure and application monitoring on multiple platforms
• Discover easy-to-follow, practical solutions to problems in network monitoring with Zabbix

Book Description

This updated second edition of the Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook brings you new recipes, updated with Zabbix 6 functionality. You'll learn how to set up Zabbix with built-in high availability, use the improved Business Service Monitoring, set up automatic reporting, and create advanced triggers. Zabbix offers useful insights into your infrastructure performance and issues and enables you to enhance your monitoring setup with its powerful features. This book covers hands-on, easy-to-follow recipes for using Zabbix 6 to monitor effectively the performance of devices and applications over the network.

You'll start by working your way through the installation and most prominent features of Zabbix and make the right design choices for building a scalable and easily manageable environment. This Zabbix book contains recipes for building items and triggers for different types of monitoring, building templates, and using Zabbix proxies. Next, you'll use the Zabbix API for customization and manage your Zabbix server and database efficiently. Finally, you'll find quick solutions to the common and not-so-common problems that you may encounter in your Zabbix monitoring work.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to use Zabbix for all your monitoring needs and build a solid Zabbix setup by leveraging its key functionalities.

What you will learn

• Implement your high-availability Zabbix setup
• Build templates and explore the different types of monitoring available in Zabbix 6
• Use Zabbix proxies to scale your environment effectively
• Work with custom integrations and the Zabbix API
• Set up advanced triggers and effective alerting
• Maintain your Zabbix setup for scaling, backups, and upgrades
• Discover how to perform advanced Zabbix database management
• Monitor cloud-based products such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Docker

Who this book is for

This book is for IT engineers who want to get started with Zabbix and anyone with an intermediate-level understanding of Zabbix looking to extend their knowledge. Although not necessary, prior experience with Zabbix will help you to make the most of this book.

Chapter 1: Installing Zabbix and Getting Started Using the Frontend

Zabbix 6 is like a continuation of Zabbix 5, as this time around we aren't looking at big UI changes. However, in Zabbix 6, you will still find a lot of improvements, both to the UI and core components. For example, the introduction of high availability for the Zabbix server. We will detail all of the important changes throughout the book.

In this chapter, we will install the Zabbix server and explore the Zabbix UI to get you familiar with it. We will go over finding your hosts, triggers, dashboards, and more to make sure you feel confident diving into the deeper material later on in this book. The Zabbix UI has a lot of options to explore, so if you are just getting started, don't get overwhelmed. It's quite structurally built and once you get the hang of it, I am confident you will find your way without issues. You will learn all about these subjects in the following recipes:

• Installing the Zabbix server
• Setting up the Zabbix frontend
• Enabling Zabbix server high availability
• Using the Zabbix frontend
• Navigating the Zabbix frontend

Technical requirements

We'll be starting this chapter with an empty Linux (virtual) machine. Feel free to choose a RHEL- or Debian-based Linux distribution. We will then set up a Zabbix server from scratch on this host.

So before jumping in, make sure you have your Linux host at the ready.

Installing the Zabbix server

Before doing anything within Zabbix, we need to install it and get ready to start working with it. In this recipe, we are going to discover how to install Zabbix server 6.

Getting ready

Before we actually install the Zabbix server, we are going to need to fulfill some prerequisite requirements. We will be using MariaDB mostly throughout this book. MariaDB is popular and a lot of information is available on the use of it with Zabbix.

At this point, you should have a prepared Linux server in front of you running either a RHEL- or Debian-based distribution. I'll be installing CentOS and Ubuntu 20.04 on my server; let's call them lar-book-centos and lar-book-ubuntu.

When you have your server ready, we can start the installation process.

How to do it…

1. Let's start by adding the Zabbix 6.0 repository to our system.

For RHEL-based systems:

rpm -Uvh https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/6.0/rhel/8/x86_64/zabbix-release-6.0-1.el8.noarch.rpm

dnf clean all

For Ubuntu systems:

wget https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/6.0/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_6.0-1+ubuntu20.04_all.deb

dpkg -i zabbix-release_6.0-1+ubuntu20.04_all.deb

apt update

2. Now that the repository is added, let's add the MariaDB repository on our server:
   wget https://downloads.mariadb.com/MariaDB/mariadb_repo_setup
   chmod +x mariadb_repo_setup
   ./mariadb_repo_setup
3. Then install and enable it using the following commands:

For RHEL-based systems:

dnf install mariadb-server

systemctl enable mariadb

systemctl start mariadb

For Ubuntu systems:

apt install mariadb-server

systemctl enable mariadb

systemctl start mariadb

4. After installing MariaDB, make sure to secure your installation with the following command:
   /usr/bin/mariadb-secure-installation
5. Make sure to answer the questions with yes (Y) and configure a root password that's secure.
6. Run through the secure installation setup and make sure to save your password somewhere. It's highly recommended to use a password vault.
7. Now, let's install our Zabbix server with MySQL support.

For RHEL-based systems:

dnf install zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-sql-scripts

For Ubuntu systems:

apt install zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-sql-scripts

8. With the Zabbix server installed, we are ready to create our Zabbix database. Log in to MariaDB with the following:
   mysql -u root -p
9. Enter the password you set up during the secure installation and create the Zabbix database with the following commands. Do not forget to change password in the second command:
   create database zabbix character set utf8mb4 collate utf8mb4_bin;
   create user zabbix@localhost identified by 'password';
   grant all privileges on zabbix.* to zabbix@localhost identified by 'password';
   flush privileges;
   quit
   Tip
   For those who might require it, Zabbix does also support utf8mb4 now. We've changed utf8 to utf8mb4 in the command above and everything will work. For a reference, check the Zabbix support ticket here: https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-3706.
10. Now we need to import our Zabbix database scheme to our newly created Zabbix database:
    zcat /usr/share/doc/zabbix-sql-scripts/mysql/server.sql.gz | mysql -u zabbix -p zabbix
    Important Note
    At this po...