Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring

In the next few days the first book completely about Zabbix (that I am aware of) is being released. Entitled Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring it is a welcome release. In my mind books and ever increasing version numbers are a good sign for the health of Zabbix.

While the existing documentation for Zabbix is pretty decent it is presented in a very reference-focused manner. It can explain something you know to ask about very well but doesn’t offer tips or more general context for the best approach to take in your setup. This new book takes that core documentation (restates it perhaps a tiny amount too much) and makes it far more presentable and easier to scan in a way that promotes picking up those little details the documentation is not good for.

I’ve been working through most of this book the last few days and wanted to provide some thoughts both good and bad.

The Good:

• This is a very complete book. The gaps in the documentation are well filled.
• I’ve setup 1.4 and 1.6 Zabbix servers and installed a 1.8 server to work through the book with. Even when reading it very quickly I learned several new things that I flat out wasn’t aware of or saw cleaner ways to do things (like using the built in IPMI agent support instead of wrapping freeipmi or similar).
• Tasks around maintaining Zabbix are well covered. I greatly appreciate there being dedicated sections and chapters on upgrading, backups, reporting, and performance tuning of Zabbix itself.
• While the book does start out slow with basic content it finishes very strong and covers a lot of more advanced topics that make it obvious the author has actually used the software he is writing about.
• The screenshots, code samples, and command line examples are complete enough that you don’t have to have a terminal open while reading.
• I like the iterative approach used in many of the examples where the reader is shown each layer of the setup to aid with troubleshooting.
• The versions of Zabbix are not highly dissimilar so this would be a good reference for any reasonably recent release (with primarily 1.6 experience the entire book still felt completely relevant).

The Bad:

• The book is pretty verbose and a nontrivial portion is already captured by the freely available documentation.
• The Linux help early on feels out of place and is not particularly good advice. Perhaps it is just me but surely it would be safe to assume intermediate Linux knowledge from an audience that is setting up network monitoring. The parts towards the front about writing init scripts and getting things installed are completely unnecessary on any reasonable Linux distribution (yum, pacman, apt-get all have Zabbix server and clients you can install with a single command). Though, I suppose that information could be helpful if you want a non standard config or some insight into how things work a bit under the hood.
• My biggest issue is the amount of background and the number of pages before what I consider the meat gets covered in depth. That is, triggers, actions, notifications, and charting.

Conclusion

Overall I am happy to see this book released. Despite some rough edges in the interface and documentation (this book hopefully will fill the latter gap) Zabbix is a really powerful, flexible piece of software that deserves more users. I have used Nagios, Zenoss, Cacti, and plenty of my own bash script setups and prefer Zabbix over everything else.

While this book does restate some of the official documentation it does bring deeper examples and better context in addition to a lot of additional content that would be very helpful for someone getting started with Zabbix. It is a long book that probably doesn’t make sense to read cover to cover (you probably will never need all the information in here unless you are building a gnarly monitoring install) but it would be a great learning tool and handy to have on hand as a reference long term for when setting up more advanced configurations.

There is enough good content in here to strongly recommend it to anyone learning about Zabbix especially if you are tasked with setting up a large or complicated installation. If you aren’t sure, give this Sample Chapter a read and see how you like the feel of the book first. That sample chapter is actually a pretty great resource as it covers the basic monitoring, triggers, actions, and notifications that are the core of Zabbix.

If you are looking to monitor your gear with any degree of depth Zabbix really is a great tool. The web-based monitoring options popping up are great for shallow uptime reports and basic notifications on complete outtages but Zabbix can be used to tell you a lot more about why things are failing. At my old company I was monitoring DB TPS, Java heap and garbage collection stats, OpenMQ queue sizes, Postfix queues, end-to-end response time for users logging into their dashboards, and all sorts of other cool stuff in addition to the basics you get with the default templates.

Disclaimer: I was provided a copy of this book by Packt Publishing and was happy to give it a read.