What this book covers
Chapter 1, Installing a Distributed Zabbix Setup, teaches you how to install Zabbix in a distributed setup, with a large use of proxies. The chapter will guide you through all the possible setup scenarios, showing you the main differences between the active and passive proxy setup. This chapter will explain how to prepare and set up a Zabbix installation, which is ready to be grown within your infrastructure, ready to support you, and monitor a large environment or even a very large one.
Chapter 2, Active Monitoring of Your Devices, offers you a few very useful examples of the different monitoring possibilities Zabbix can achieve by relying on different methods and protocols. You'll see how to query your network from the link level up to routing and network flow using ICMP, SNMP, and log-parsing facilities to collect your measurements. You will also learn how to extract meaningful information from the gathered data using aggregated and calculated items, and configuring complex triggers that will alert you about real network issues while minimizing signal noise and false positives.
Chapter 3, Monitoring Your Network Services, takes you through how to effectively monitor the most critical network services, such as DNS, DHCP, NTP, Apache proxy / reverse proxies, and proxy cache Squid. As it is easy to understand, all of them are critical services where a simple issue can affect your network setup and quickly propagate the issue to your entire network. You will understand how to extract meaningful metrics and useful data from all the listed services, being able then not only to monitor their own reliability, but also to acquire important metrics that can help you to predict failures or issues.
Chapter 4, Discovering Your Network, explains how to deeply automate the monitoring configuration of network objects. It will massively use the built-in discovery feature in order to keep the monitoring solution up-to-date within an evolving network environment. This chapter is divided into two core parts that cover the two main levels of Zabbix's discovery: host discovery and low-level discovery.
Chapter 5, Visualizing Your Topology with Maps and Graphs, shows you how to create complex graphs from your item's numerical values, automatically draw maps that reflect the current status of your network, and bring it all together using screens as a tool to customize monitoring data presentation. This chapter also presents a smart way to automate the initial startup of your Zabbix's setup, making you able to draw network diagrams using maps in a fully automated way. You will then learn a production-ready method to maintain maps while your network is growing or rapidly changing.
Appendix A, Partitioning the Zabbix Database, contains all the required software and stored procedures to efficiently partition your Zabbix database.
Appendix B, Collecting Squid Metrics, contains the software used to monitor Squid.
