Defining the environment size

Since this book is focused on a large environment, we need to define or at least provide basic fixed points to identify a large environment. There are various things to consider in this definition; basically, we can identify an environment as large when:

• There are more than one different physical locations
• The number of monitored devices is high (hundreds or thousands)
• The number of checks and items retrieved per second is high (more than 500)
• There are lots of items, triggers, and data to handle (the database is larger than 100 GB)
• The availability and performance are both critical

All of the preceding points define a large environment; in this kind of environment, the installation and maintenance of Zabbix infrastructure play a critical role.

The installation, of course, is a task that is defined well on a timely basis and, probably, is one of the most critical tasks; it is really important to go live with a strong and reliable monitoring infrastructure. Also, once we go live with the monitoring in place, it will not be so easy to move/migrate pieces without any loss of data. There are certain other things to consider: we will have a lot of tasks related to our monitoring system, most of which are daily tasks, but in a large environment, they require particular attention.

In a small environment with a small database, a backup will keep you busy for a few minutes, but if the database is large, this task will consume a considerable amount of time to be completed.

The restore and relative-restore plans should be considered and tested periodically to be aware of the time needed to complete this task in the event of a disaster or critical hardware failure.

Between maintenance tasks, we need to consider testing and putting into production upgrades with minimal impact, along with the daily tasks and daily checks.