Systura Where information becomes knowledge...

I started playing with Zabbix.  After many false starts, mainly because I like to just press enter without reading everything, I got Zabbix installed on my Ubuntu server.  Zabbix is very different from Nagios, which I have been using for years, and it took me a few hours to figure out how to simply ping something within Zabbix.

Setting up monitoring in Zabbix is an entire process, first, create the host, then, create the item, and then, for some reason, Zabbix was not running, so I had to start it and then I started getting ping results.  The configuration process seems a bit twisted, but I am getting my head around the configuration.

One of the nice features that I like about Zabbix is the integration of graphs.  For every value, you get a graph.  Thus, if you get a ping time, you get a graph of ping responsiveness, almost information overload, but it has its usefulness.

I have gone as far as setting up some alerts, but nothing has gone down yet, so we will see how the alerting works.  I have heard the alerting is not as good as Nagios, but I am waiting to see.

Templates are nice, but I have not figured them out completely yet.  I have several of them; one for ping monitoring, one for ssh monitoring, one for http monitoring, etc.  There has to be a better way, but I will keep fighting with it.

I am still not certain if I came going to replace Nagios, but I will run them both for a while.