Preface

Ever since its first public release in 2001, Zabbix has distinguished itself as a very powerful and effective monitoring solution. As an open source product, it's easy to obtain and deploy, and its unique approach to metrics and alarms has helped to set it apart from its competitors, both open and commercial. It's a powerful, compact package with very low requirements in terms of hardware and supporting software for a basic yet effective installation. If you add a relative ease of use, it's clear that it can be a very good contender for small environments with a tight budget. But it's when it comes to managing a huge number of monitored objects, with a complex configuration and dependencies, that Zabbix's scalability and inherently distributed architecture really shines. More than anything, Zabbix can be an ideal solution in large and complex distributed environments, where being able to manage efficiently and extract meaningful information from monitored objects and events is just as important if not more important than the usual considerations about costs, accessibility, and the ease of use.

This is a second edition book, the first having been coauthored by Andrea Dalle Vacche and Stefano Kewan Lee. The purpose of this book is to help you make the most of your Zabbix installation to leverage all of its power to monitor any large and complex environment effectively.