Zabbix Training Course

• Zabbix Level 1
  • About monitoring, trending and notification (services, systems, equipment)
  • Steps to Basic monitoring
    • Installing the client (windows, linux)
    • Connecting to the server
    • Identifying monitored Items
    • Introduction to templates and cloning
    Adding SNMP items
    • Creating graphs for  trending and visualization
    • Creating
    Screens
    • Screens 
    • Introduction to triggers
    • Setting up canned monitor and notifications
• Zabbix Level 2
  • Modifying standard item monitors
  • SNMP Basics (snmpwalk, mibs, traps and polling)
  • Getting and testing mibs
  • Configuring traps
  • Using custom scripts to monitor services
  • Creating monitored items and notification
  • Creating Templates and Items
  • Exporting historical data from Zabbix

Other information

• Level 1- Who Should Attend:  Managers, Systems Analysts, Div Reps, Operators, Help Desk staff interested in learning how monitoring and automated notification of systems and services is done using Zabbix
• Level 2- Who Should Attend:  Systems Analysts, Managers, Operators, Div Reps, and anyone interested in learning how to configure monitoring and notifications of systems, services and equipment using SNMP.  This section is specifically targeted towards devices, Operating Systems and services that can not be monitored by installing an agent or where additional monitoring is required.

ITIL Compliance and Rice IT

The use of Zabbix at Rice is instrumental in our ITIL service support model.  The software provides 3 functions that are leveraged to provide the best service delivery possible.

1) Trending; The ability to gather data about key indicators of systems functions over time to provide forecasting and to baseline service health.

2) Monitoring:  The ability to automate the tracking of resource utilization for scaling, service health checks and event identification.  The early detection of events before they become problems.

3) Notification:  The automated action of communicating event threshold alert or sudden service or system problems that may require immediate action in order to minimize the disruption of services.

4) Compliance:  ITIL provides a framework for successful IT service deployments based on meeting expected or agreed upon service levels (SLA).  Measuring the service deliverable in compliance with SLA can be done using Zabbix

Systems and Equipment:

IT - SAI manages 2 Zabbix servers that form the core of the service.  The Middleware group is responsible for maintaining and providing this service to IT or anyone at Rice who wishes to utilize it.  Account can be requested on the system by signing up for this training class.  The account on the Zabbix system is set at a level of access comparable to the skill and training of the individual.  Basic access is set to allow an system or service steward the ability to create, add, modify, delete, and configure systems monitoring for any number of machines or services.  

The Zabbix service performs the duties of monitoring servers and services, collecting trending data for use in analysis and reporting, automated reporting of trigger events such as threshold watermarks and component failures and data analysis of services levels.

Basics of Monitoring:  Zabbix can support via OS agents for MS Windows, most linux flavors and some unix operating systems.  The "agentless" support is SNMP based with the Zabbix agent supporting both snmp poll and trap methods. Both of these methods can gather information about your server or service in a central location under a common framework, tool set and web based visualization.

Steps to basic monitoring:

1. Installing the agent for a specific OS
   1. Windows installations are the most simple to perform and are done using an MSI that is executed on the target system

   2. Wiki Markup
      Linux and Unix installation are only slightly more complex and can be accomplished by following the steps in \[  LINK \]

2. While the Zabbix agent is useful and affective in adding a target to the server database, it is not required in order to monitor a system or service which can be done manually or via xml import for standardized gear such as network components, storage systems or other closed operating systems or firmware.  Manually adding target items in Zabbix is done by configuring a new HOST entry.  The minimum required information for adding a new host is
   1. You will need a unique name - Rice uses hostnames
   2. The IP address or hostname of the system
   3. An association with some group of other servers or a new group association such as department, type of service or other association.  New groups can be added on request.
   4. (not required but beneficial) A monitoring template that will be used to reduce the work of identifying items that will be monitored on the server or system