1. A Zabbix Believer’s Story……
Jayesh Thakrar
Chief Architect, Mikoomi making enterprise monitoring virtual

2. Topics 1. Introduction 2. Comparison : Nagios v/s Zabbix
3. Zabbix : Architecture Overview
4. Zabbix : Browser based GUI
5. Mikoomi : Open-source Value-Add Agents & Consulting Services

3. Introduction

4. How It All Began….. Needed to monitor IT systems - 24x7
Are applications, web servers, databases and other services up?
Needed insight into performance
Visibility into current and historical performance and load
Quantifying, charting and trending of load, performance and utilization
Tool for HelpDesk (Level-1 Support)

5. Choices: Commercial Players

6. Choices: Nagios & Derivaties

7. Choices: Other Open Source

8. Top Contenders: Nagios & Zabbix

9. Nagios: Brief Overview
Pros
Popular and well-known
Basis for many other open source systems
Template-based and object oriented inheritance
Based out of Minneapolis, US
Boost (?) by RedHat announcement

10. Nagios: Brief Overview
Cons
Requires significant effort for setup
Setup, admin and configuration = text file based
Monitoring data stored in single flat file (or via pipe into database)
High I/O on data file from monitoring and UI
Configuration change require reload
“Primitive” graphing and monitoring UI

11. Zabbix : Brief Overview
Pros
Agent and agent-less monitoring
SNMP support
Template based
Scalable, distributed architecture
Built-in UNIX, log-file, SNMP and URL monitoring
Easy to extend with plug-ins or agents
Active development
Database based monitoring data storage
Thresholds and alerting separate from monitoring

12. Zabbix : Brief Overview
Pros
Multiple items or attributes per monitored entity
Different items of an entity can be monitored by different mechanisms
Can define alerts based on comparison of current item value with historical values, averages, etc.
Can build dependencies between monitored entities
Pre-canned (template-based) graphs as well as ad-hoc graphs on any monitored item
User-defined maps, screens and slide-shows

13. Convinced that N to Z is more than Just a 90° rotation ??
Nagios to Zabbix N Z
Convinced that N to Z is more than Just a 90° rotation ??

14. Zabbix Architecture Overview

15. Zabbix Distributed Architecture
External monitoring data collectors
Zabbix OS Agents
Zabbix Node (Central)
Web Server
Zabbix Server
Zabbix Distributed Nodes
Zabbix Database
External Scripts
Proxy Servers or Proxy Agents

16. Inside the Zabbix Server
Poller Processes
watchdog
housekeeper
alerter
poller
httppoller
pinger
db_config_syncer
db_data_syncer
nodewatcher
timer
discoverer
escalator
Zabbix Server Processes

17. Zabbix OS Agent OS-level agents for most popular platforms
Linux
AIX, HP-UX, Solaris
MacOS
Windows
OS agents can run external programs to complement / enhance monitoring

18. Zabbix Monitoring Approach
Templates
Define new or modify existing templates
Contains monitoring data elements called items
Contains thresholds (triggers) and actions on item
Collection of pre-defined graphs using items
Hosts
Hosts = monitored entity e.g. hosts, applications, databases, etc.
Define new hosts and link to template
Customize triggers and actions if necessary
Data Collection – by Server, Agent or Proxy

19. Zabbix: Built-in Templates

20. Zabbix: Template Items

21. Zabbix: Item Configuration

22. Zabbix Browser based GUI

23. GUI: Login Page

24. GUI: Dashboard

25. GUI: Dashboard – Favorites

26. GUI: Dashboard – Minimized

27. GUI: Menu Options

28. GUI: Monitoring Data Display - Tabular

29. GUI: Monitoring Data Display - Tabular

30. GUI: Monitoring Data Graphs - Adhoc

31. GUI: Data Graphs – Pre-canned

32. GUI: Data Graphs – Custom

33. GUI: Templates and Triggers

34. GUI: Trigger Definitions

35. GUI: Alert Listing

36. GUI: Alert s

37. GUI: User & Group Administration

38. GUI: Group Security

39. enterprise monitoring made virtual

40. About mikoomi Mikoomi, the company -
Develops, distributes and supports open-source monitoring solutions
Provides custom development and consulting around monitoring and high availability
Strong believer in open-source – as a consumer and as a producer

41. mikoomi Products & Services
Mikoomi Monitoring Agents
Services & Support
Mikoomi value-add
Zabbix Monitoring Framework

42. mikoomi Products - Appliance
Mikoomi Monitoring Appliance
Appliance = virtual machine template
Contains Zabbix + Ubuntu + best practices
Zabbix = Best open source monitoring
Ubuntu = One of the best Linux variants
Quick, easy & flexible to deploy
Up and running in less than 60 minutes

43. mikoomi Products – Agents
Mikoomi Monitoring Agents
Add-on monitoring capabilities for databases, application servers, software components, custom apps
Embed deep product-specific expertise and monitoring best practices
Covers key health and performance data
Open-source makes them extensible
Minimally “intrusive” on monitored entity
Java JVM and DB2 released
WebSphere, Tomcat, SQL Server, Oracle, ActiveMQ and others planned for release

44. mikoomi Services Services Deployment, implementation and training
Consulting & custom development
Develop custom monitoring for software vendors to help operations and monitoring of their products

45. mikoomi: Sizing and Capacity
Single node (appliance) with 2 CPUs + 2 GB memory supports monitoring a “sizable” IT environment -
10 – 20 servers +
20 – 40 databases or instances +
20 – 40 application instances
Scales horizontally and vertically