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Zabbix Performance Tuning
Zabbix Performance Tuning

Zabbix Performance Tuning: Tune and optimize Zabbix to maximize performance

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Profile Icon Luciano de C Alves Profile Icon Luciano Alves
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.5 (8 Ratings)
Paperback Jun 2015 152 pages 1st Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Luciano de C Alves Profile Icon Luciano Alves
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€18.99 per month
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.5 (8 Ratings)
Paperback Jun 2015 152 pages 1st Edition
eBook
€13.98 €19.99
Paperback
€24.99
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Free Trial
Renews at €18.99p/m
eBook
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Paperback
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Zabbix Performance Tuning

Chapter 2. Zabbix and I – Almost Heroes

Ever since I started working with IT infrastructure, I have been noticing that almost every company, when they start thinking about a monitoring tool, think of trying to know in some way when the system or service will go down before it actually happens. They expect the monitoring tool to create some kind of alert when something is broken. But by this approach, the system administrator will know about an error or system outage only after the error occurs (and maybe, at the same time, users are trying to use those systems).

We need a monitoring solution to help us predict system outages and any other situation that our services can be affected by. Our approach with monitoring tools should cover not only our system monitoring but also our business monitoring.

Nowadays, any company (small, medium, or large) has some dependency on technologies, from servers and network assets to IP equipment with a lower environmental impact. Maybe you...

After starting Zabbix – the initial steps

Suppose you already have your Zabbix server up and running. In a few weeks, Zabbix has helped you save a lot of time while restoring systems. It has also helped you notice some hidden things in your environment—maybe a flapping port in a network switch, or lack of CPU in a router.

In a few months, Zabbix and you (of course) are like superstars. During lunch, people are talking about you. Some are happy because you've dealt with a recurring error. Maybe, a manager asks you to find a way to monitor a printer because it's very important to their team, another manager asks you to monitor an application, and so on.

The other teams and areas also need some kind of monitoring. They have other things to monitor, not only IT things. But are these people familiar with technical things? Technical words, expressions, flows, and lines of thoughts are not so easy for people with nontechnical backgrounds to understand.

Of course, in small...

The natural growth

In most scenarios, natural growth will occur without control. I mean, people are not used to planning this growth. It is very important to keep it under control.

When some guys start their Zabbix deployment, they probably do not intend to cater to all company teams, areas, or businesses. They think about their needs and their team only. So, they don't think a lot about user rights, mainly because they are technicians and know mostly about hosts, items, triggers, maps, graphs, screens, and so on. What about users who are not technicians? Will they understand the Zabbix interface easily? Do you know that in Zabbix, we have a lot of paths that reach the same point?

The Zabbix interface isn't object-based, which means that users need a lot of clicks to reach (read or write) the information related to an object (hosts, items, graphs, triggers, events, and so on).

If you need to see the most recent data gathered from a specific item, you'll need to use the Monitoring...

Beyond infrastructure

I think the monitoring solutions approach is changing, and I like this change. We know that every business nowadays has some dependency on technology, and it is normal to think that a monitoring solution will help keep their systems and services running.

But Zabbix can go beyond this. Actually, any reliable monitoring tool must work like a charm with infrastructure-monitoring things. If a monitoring tool has some loopholes, it's not a good tool and we shouldn't use it.

The real goal of a monitoring solution is how many new methods of gathering data it can show you, and how much it can interact with other tools. Zabbix can do both of these things like a charm.

A few years ago, I worked on a Zabbix deployment created to monitor water pumps. We know that water pumps are not smart devices (at least, the water pumps that I know aren't). That kind of device isn't accessible by a USB or serial port, nor by TCP/IP, SNMP, or any other network protocol. But...

The Internet of Things wave

Probably, you have already heard about the Internet of Things (IoT). Just in case you haven't, let me try to explain a little about it.

In 2013, the Gartner Group said that IOTs installed base will grow to 26 billion units by 2020. They also say this:

"By 2020, component costs will have come down to the point that connectivity will become a standard feature, even for processors costing less than 1 USD. This opens up the possibility of connecting just about anything, from the very simple to the very complex, to offer remote control, monitoring and sensing," said Mr. Middleton. "The fact is, that today, many categories of connected things in 2020 don't yet exist. As product designers dream up ways to exploit the inherent connectivity that will be offered in intelligent products, we expect the variety of devices offered to explode."

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said in 2005:

It looks at the next step in "always...

Everyone knows about Zabbix

Of course, most teams and user groups know about Zabbix and their capabilities. Will they be asked to create new templates and data collectors? Will they be asked to create new graphs, maps, and screens? You need to realize that your Zabbix server should be prepared to listen to and comply with the user's wishes.

What kind of interaction with Zabbix will the guys from logistics or factory floor have? Surely, you'll receive a lot of tickets asking new questions, and these will come from distinct areas.

Our experience with Zabbix shows that business areas are quite interested in monitoring issues. These are the most demanding users with respect to new monitoring and new ways to visualize the data collected.

These users will not be technical, and that's where we need careful attention. How do we get a collection of data from this diverse environment? Since these users want to visualize this data, a "latest data" screen isn't enough for...

After starting Zabbix – the initial steps


Suppose you already have your Zabbix server up and running. In a few weeks, Zabbix has helped you save a lot of time while restoring systems. It has also helped you notice some hidden things in your environment—maybe a flapping port in a network switch, or lack of CPU in a router.

In a few months, Zabbix and you (of course) are like superstars. During lunch, people are talking about you. Some are happy because you've dealt with a recurring error. Maybe, a manager asks you to find a way to monitor a printer because it's very important to their team, another manager asks you to monitor an application, and so on.

The other teams and areas also need some kind of monitoring. They have other things to monitor, not only IT things. But are these people familiar with technical things? Technical words, expressions, flows, and lines of thoughts are not so easy for people with nontechnical backgrounds to understand.

Of course, in small and medium enterprises ...

The natural growth


In most scenarios, natural growth will occur without control. I mean, people are not used to planning this growth. It is very important to keep it under control.

When some guys start their Zabbix deployment, they probably do not intend to cater to all company teams, areas, or businesses. They think about their needs and their team only. So, they don't think a lot about user rights, mainly because they are technicians and know mostly about hosts, items, triggers, maps, graphs, screens, and so on. What about users who are not technicians? Will they understand the Zabbix interface easily? Do you know that in Zabbix, we have a lot of paths that reach the same point?

The Zabbix interface isn't object-based, which means that users need a lot of clicks to reach (read or write) the information related to an object (hosts, items, graphs, triggers, events, and so on).

If you need to see the most recent data gathered from a specific item, you'll need to use the Monitoring menu, then...

Beyond infrastructure


I think the monitoring solutions approach is changing, and I like this change. We know that every business nowadays has some dependency on technology, and it is normal to think that a monitoring solution will help keep their systems and services running.

But Zabbix can go beyond this. Actually, any reliable monitoring tool must work like a charm with infrastructure-monitoring things. If a monitoring tool has some loopholes, it's not a good tool and we shouldn't use it.

The real goal of a monitoring solution is how many new methods of gathering data it can show you, and how much it can interact with other tools. Zabbix can do both of these things like a charm.

A few years ago, I worked on a Zabbix deployment created to monitor water pumps. We know that water pumps are not smart devices (at least, the water pumps that I know aren't). That kind of device isn't accessible by a USB or serial port, nor by TCP/IP, SNMP, or any other network protocol. But it was possible to do...

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Description

This book is aimed at Zabbix administrators who want to learn how to improve the performance of the Zabbix system. Basic knowledge of Zabbix's components and features is assumed.

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jun 30, 2015
Length: 152 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783987641
Vendor :
Zabbix
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Jun 30, 2015
Length: 152 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783987641
Vendor :
Zabbix
Tools :

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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
1. Evolution of Zabbix Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Zabbix and I – Almost Heroes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Tuning the Zabbix Server Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Tuning the MySQL Database Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Tuning the Frontend Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Adjusting the Storage Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Tuning the Operating System Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Doing the Extra Work Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Using the Zabbix Proxy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Monitoring the Health of Zabbix Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. The Next Challenge Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.5
(8 Ratings)
5 star 62.5%
4 star 25%
3 star 12.5%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
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Jérémy Jul 29, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I'm working with Zabbix for about one year now and I was looking for a book to improve my knowledge about this product.This book is a very good choice. You will learn all the good points to think about before starting installing Zabbix but also after. You will read really interesting things about performance tuning but not by telling you "do that, it will be faster". The author gives you tips and values to improve Zabbix performance but he also learns you how to test those value on your structure and see if those values are the best for you and what each value means. While I ws reading this book I was feeling that the author tried to share all his experience with us and I loved it.I've already started to implement all the good advices and started to work on new project like installing Zabbix Proxy on Raspberry Pi.If I had this book on my hands one year ago, I can tell you that I could have started to work better and it could have helped me to avoid some "beginner" mistakes.If you are a beginner with Zabbix or a pro, this book is for you if you are working (or planning to) with Zabbix and doesn't want to meet performance problem and want to understand how Zabbix works.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Werner Aug 04, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This is an very good book about tuning your Zabbix environment. Most books about Zabbix will explain how you monitor environment with items, triggers and web scenarios and how you should do this. But this book will only talk about these things when it is related about performance. Why for example is ".last()" better for performance instead of using "avg()"?. Also your environment/hardware where Zabbix is installed is described in this book. The database is very important in your setup and a whole chapter on tuning is dedicated to this.I personally liked the chapters "Chapter 3: Tuning the Zabbix Server" and "Chapter 10: Monitoring the Health of Zabbix". Chapter 3 is about the triggers I mentioned earlier and buffers and caches. I never found some clear information about these caches and buffers and what they do. Chapter 10 is about the health of Zabbix itself and basically describes the "Template App Zabbix Server" (And Proxy) templates in Zabbix what they mention/do.The author mentioned why he only focused on performance tuning for MySQL, but it would be nice in next releases if there is an chapter about tuning the PostgreSQL database. I was lucky, but I know people who have PostgreSQL as database server who can skip an chapter in this book.I really liked reading this book and is written very nice. I will definitely recommend this book to other Zabbix administrators/users.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Filipe Paternot Aug 07, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
It covers all must know topics and components:- Database- Zabbix server- Zabbix proxy- Items and triggers- Storage- Webserver- Php- Operating systemIt describes in higher details how every component interact with each other, how to estimate the size of your infrastructure, hardware for each piece, predict database and organic growth. How to construct and customize templates, why you should do it, how to monitor Zabbix health, and so on.If you already manage a big environment, you can get new ideas, consolidate others and find new ways to improve.If you don't, it will be of great help to get to know some best practices, learn to avoid some problems and/or how to deal with some that you still hit.I almost took one star off of it because of when the book approaches the DBSyncer parameter, it's not mentioned how it does behave in great detail. What the book misses, is that DBSyncer does so by locking HistoryCache by itemid, calculates trends. Sometimes it does generate a bottleneck and does not perform well enough. This is hard to monitor, but still very important. It's better described on https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBX-9201.Still a great book, though. With it, got few new insights, adopted the use of php accelerators and validated many other aspects of current implementation.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Deyrick Santos Sep 27, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Leitura essencial para aqueles que tem grandes ambientes rodando zabbix.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Daniel Teubner Jul 29, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
What I like most about this book is that it is short and quickly to read. But it is full of helpfull informations regarding Zabbix perfomance AND the Zabbix structure in total. So no bla bla around the information.The booked helped me as an "experienced starter" with Zabbix to get a better picture what is in which relation to all the other components of the system.So it is worth not only if you have performance issues but also to get a good background on all the Zabbix components.The tips and things to considere are all clear and can be directly used even the author says that the exact tuning values depends on your structure. But you can copy them to your site and from the book you learn how to tweak them for you and how to monitor them. As my team mate is the Zabbix pro I trusted him a lot but after reading this book I found a lot of things we could have done better from the start. And chaning them now helped us to avoid some pitfalls.So even if the content seems to be for the Zabbix pros it will help us beginners also very good.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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