ITIL Compliance and Rice ITThe use of Zabbix at Rice is instrumental in our ITIL service support model. The software provides 4 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. Requests for support should be routed directly into the help desk system under Infrastructure Unix, or via the help desk to the Infrastructure Unix Queue. 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. Availabililty monitoring via ICMP can be accomplished without the need to install a client or use SNMP. Hardware monitoring using IPMI is also supported. |