Chapter 5. Visualizing Data

Zabbix is a flexible monitoring system. Once implemented on an installation, it is ready to support a heavy workload and will help you acquire a huge amount of every kind of data. The next step is to graph your data, interpolate, and correlate the metrics between them. The strong point is that you can relate different type of metrics on the same axis of time, analyzing patterns of heavy and light utilization, identifying services and equipment that fail most frequently in your infrastructure, and capturing relationships between the metrics of connected services.

Beyond the standard graphs facility, Zabbix offers you a way to create your custom graphs and to add them on your own template, thus creating an easy method to propagate your graphs across all the servers. Those custom graphs (and also the standard and simple graphs) can be collected into screens. Inside Zabbix, a screen can contain different kinds of information—simple graphs, custom...