Adding Scripts to Zabbix

Scripts in Zabbix can be used to generate item data for monitoring, for actions when a trigger occurs, or allow users to manually run from the web interface. Scripts can be any language and do basically anything as long as it can accept command line arguments and the output can be seen by Zabbix. This […]

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Templates in Zabbix

Everything set at the template level is inherited by hosts. The advantage of this design is that a large number of hosts can be applied to a template and they will all be monitored the exact same way. Modifications made to the template are applied to all hosts associated with the template, but customization to […]

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Zabbix Basics

At the most basic level, the Zabbix monitoring system performs three tasks: Periodically poll hosts and APIs – this is called metric collection Based on the value of metrics, produce events – these are called triggers Based on triggers, produce actions such as notify, control, configure Hosts The main monitoring object in Zabbix is a […]

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Groups in Zabbix

An unlimited number of groups can be applied to hosts and those hosts can belong to any template. It is good practice to have many groups associated with hosts so that it is easy to categorize them many different ways. For example, a host can belong to a group for the building name, a group […]

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Macros in Zabbix

Macros in Zabbix are key to building scalable architecture within Zabbix. Macros can be used almost anywhere within Zabbix and allow you fill an unlimited number of variable fields that retrieve the value from a single set macro. There are different levels of macros that override each other, which makes the system much more versatile. […]

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Statistical Hosts in Zabbix

Statistical hosts are the use of statistics on groups of hosts. This allows a user to see what percent of a group of hosts are experiencing the same issue. It is very useful when monitoring fleets of devices such as wireless access points within a building or redundant nodes. I created 10 VMs and added […]

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Send Notifications from Zabbix to Slack

It’s surprisingly easy to setup Zabbix to send notifications to Slack including customizing which notifications go to which Slack channels and what to include on the Slack message. There is official documentation for Zabbix 4.4 available here. The official documentation is very lacking so I’m going to walk through setup start to finish and test […]

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Monitoring Ashly Protea Amplifiers with Zabbix

Ashly makes their own software to operate their Protea amplifiers. For testing, I bought two of them on eBay for much less than MSRP. Since Protea does not provide any sort of alerting, let’s use Zabbix to monitor the amplifiers so we know if a problem ever occurs. First, let’s take a look at what […]

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Monitoring Mersive Solstice Pods with Zabbix

The company Mersive manufacturers a product called the Solstice Pod that allows for users to wirelessly share/cast the screens of their phones and computers to displays. They are popular devices for conference rooms where HDMI ports can be worn out or damaged. They also benefit from not needing any special hardware dongles/adapters/hubs and also reduce […]

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Monitoring MySQL with Zabbix

I ran into quite a few issues with setting up a Zabbix agent for Linux to monitor the server and the MySQL database on the machine. It seems that MySQL monitoring in Zabbix has been slightly modified over the years and little change documentation was made to keep up with it. I’m going to go […]

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