Systura Where information becomes knowledge...

Sometimes you just have to realize that you make mistakes and the software is doing what I told it, even if I want to believe it is a bug!

I have been playing with Zabbix and starting to like it after figuring out how to configure it.  Yesterday, I spent the day playing with actions, which are a way to alert me if something has happened that I need to know about.  I had created a rule if ping failed and nothing had failed, so I created an "informational" trigger to notify me if somebody was logged into a server.

When creating an action, you must first start with a trigger.  So, I wrote the trigger and it worked great.  Then I wrote the action and it never happened.  After fighting for a few hours, I left it configured and was considering getting rid of Zabbix, because if I can not get a simple action working, then what use is Zabbix.

Well, overnight, ping failed on one site I was monitoring and I got an action.  Well, something strange must be happening with my user login action.  The only thing different between the action that fired and the action that did not was the severity of the trigger.  I started to play with the severity and found out if I set the severity to anything higher than warning, then the action was triggered.

After digging around in the manuals, I found a section which indicated that the severity was tied to the media type which was tied to the user and I looked at my user configuration and found out that I only wanted messages for severity greater than warning!  Oh well, lesson learned.  I only wish there was a log somewhere to tell me that, "Yes, I would have generated an action, but you did not want to receive it..."

I am back to liking Zabbix.

Next thing to tackle is SNMP tracking.  Zabbix does not have an auto discovery like Cacti or MRTG function built in, that I know of, but I will continue to check for that function and if not, see how much work is required to set it up.