Zabbix

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Maintainer

[1]Daniel B. from Firewall Services

Description

Zabbix offers advanced monitoring, alerting and visualisation features today which are missing in other monitoring systems, even some of the best commercial ones:

Features

Here are some of the features provided by Zabbix:

• Distributed monitoring
  • Centralized configuration
  • Centralized access to all data
  • Up-to 1000 of nodes
  • Unlimited number of proxies

• Scalability
  • Tested with 10,000 monitored devices and servers
  • Tested with 100,000 availability and performance checks
  • Processing of thousands of availability and performance checks per second

• Real-time monitoring
  • Performance monitoring
  • Availability monitoring
  • Integrity monitoring
  • Flexible notification conditions
  • Alerting users (Email, SMS, Jabber)
  • Logging

• Visualisation
  • User-defined views and slide shows
  • Mapping
  • Graphing (including pie charts)
  • Zooming

• Fast Problem Resolution
  • Send alerts via email, cell phone, SMS or audio alerts
  • Execute remote commands

• Assuring SLA
  • Hierarchical IT Services
  • Real-time SLA reporting

• Reporting and trending
  • Easy integration of 3rd party tools
  • Analysis of yearly/monthly/daily statistics
  • SLA reports

• XML data import/export
  • Easy sharing of templates

• Auto discovery
  • Discovery by IP range, services and SNMP
  • Automatic monitoring of discovered devices

• WEB monitoring
  • WEB performance and availability monitoring
  • Flexible scenarios
  • Support of POST and GET methods

• Flexibility
  • Support of IPv4 and IPv6
  • Easily extendable native agents
  • Any notifications methods
  • Runs on any platform

• Pro-active monitoring
  • Automatic execution of remote commands
  • Automatic IPMI commands

• Aggregate monitoring
  • Monitoring of a group of hosts as a single host

• Agentless monitoring
  • Monitoring of remote services (FTP, SSH, HTTP, other)
  • Support of SNMP v1,2,3
  • Support of IPMI
  • SNMP traps

• High performance agents
  • All platforms supported (UNIX, Windows, Novell)
  • Memory utilisation
  • Network utilisation
  • Disk I/O
  • Disk space availability
  • File checksums
  • Monitoring of log files
  • And more...

• Security
  • Flexible user permissions
  • Authentication by IP address
  • Protection against brute force attacks

• Escalations and notifications
  • Repeated notifications
  • Unlimited escalations
  • Recovery messages
  • Be notified while problem is not resolved

• Management functions
  • Ping, traceroute to a host
  • Any other functions

• Dashboard
  • Personalized dashboard
  • Favourite resources
  • High level view

• Agent-based monitoring
  • Native agent for any platform
  • Immune to connection problems

• Open Source Solution
  • No license driven limitations
  • Access to source code
  • Open to code audit

• Easy Administration
  • Very fast learning curve
  • All data is stored in a database (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)
  • Centralised configuration and storage of information

• and more...

Full documentation

A complete documentation is available as a PDF file here http://www.zabbix.com/documentation.php You'll also find some useful informations on the official wiki of the project and the forum.

	Note:
	This wiki page is not a complete guide for Zabbix, but just a starting point to run it on your SME Server using this contrib. For a complete documentation, please refer to the project documentation: http://www.zabbix.com/documentation.php

Versions

The following is the information about the latest release of each component:

Contrib 10:

0.1-31

Devel 9:

0.1-19

Contrib 9:

0.1-17

smeserver-zabbix-server

The latest version of smeserver-zabbix-server is available in the SME repository, click on the version number(s) for more information.

Requirements

• SME Server 7.X (9.X or higher for zabbix-server)
• php>=5.4 for zabbix server only, hence you will need to first install smeserver-php-scl on SME9 and set php54 or higher as default php version

Components

Zabbix is composed of four major components:

• The server (the main part). The server will store and analyse the different data, send alerts, etc...
• The web interface (which is automatically installed with the server with this contrib).
• The agent, which gathers informations on the different hosts you monitor.
• The proxy, which is an optional part, can be used to collect performance and availability data locally, and send it to the server.

Server

The server is the core component of Zabbix software. It uses one database (MySQL in this contrib) to store configuration, performance and integrity information. The server can check network services with simple check (ICMP, TCP etc...) for agent-less monitoring, it can monitor network devices using SNMP and is also the central component to which agent report information (agent can work in active, passive, or both mode). The server will also analyse all the information and send alerts depending on very flexible triggers.

Installation

SME 10SME 9

yum install smeserver-extrarepositories-zabbix -y
db yum_repositories setprop zabbix44 status enabled
signal-event yum-modify
yum install smeserver-zabbix-server --enablerepo=smetest,smecontribs,smedev

First enable the needed repo: Firewall service and REMI

db yum_repositories set fws repository \
BaseURL http://repo.firewall-services.com/centos/\$releasever \
EnableGroups no GPGCheck yes \
Name "Firewall Services" \
GPGKey http://repo.firewall-services.com/RPM-GPG-KEY \
Visible no status disabled

db yum_repositories set fws-testing repository \
BaseURL http://repo.firewall-services.com/centos-testing/\$releasever \
EnableGroups no GPGCheck yes \
Name "Firewall Services Testing" \
GPGKey http://repo.firewall-services.com/RPM-GPG-KEY \
Visible no status disabled

issue the following command on the SME Server shell:

/sbin/e-smith/db yum_repositories set remi-safe repository \
Name 'Remi - safe' \
BaseURL 'http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/safe/$basearch/' \
EnableGroups no \
GPGCheck yes \
GPGKey http://rpms.famillecollet.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi \
Visible yes \
status enabled

signal-event yum-modify

to install Zabbix server, just use yum:

yum --enablerepo=smecontribs,fws,remi-safe install smeserver-zabbix-server --exclude=smeserver-zabbix-proxy

NB: the --exclude=smeserver-zabbix-proxy is due to a conflict in late 2019 on SME9 as FWS started using zabbix from zabbix repo instead of building it. We will fix this for SME10 in few months.

then go to your server-manager to set php5.4 or higher as default php for your SME, or you will not be able to access to zabbix web gui, or just issue the following

config setprop php54 PhpModule enabled   #replace here with php55 or php56 if you have other needs
signal-event php-update

then you will have to either tweak the default configuration as explain in next step or just issue :

signal-event zabbix-server-update

then go to your web interface : https://yourserveradress/zabbix

DB Parameters

Here's the list of available DB parameters for zabbix-server service on SME:

• DbName: The name of the database where everything is stored. Default is 'zabbixdb'
• DbPassword: The password of the database. A random password is generated during the installation
• DbUser: The user name to access the database. Default is zabbixuser
• JabberAccount: Account used to send jabber notification
• JabberServer: Jabber server to use to send notifications
• JabberPassword: Password for the account (for "JabberAccount")
• JabberTLS: (enabled|disabled) Does your Jabber server requires TLS security

	Note:
	The different Jabber settings above are not for the built-in jabber notification function (because I couldn't get it working as my server requires TLS and the built-in features do not support it). But I've included a external script using sendxmpp to send the notification. You should have a media called 'xmpp' in zabbix administration.

• NodeID: The node ID of your server. If you don't use distributed monitoring (just one central Zabbix server), you should let this to 0
• TCPPort: Port used for agent<->server (and proxy<->server) communication. The default is 10051
• TimeZone: It's very important for zabbix to know your time zone (PHP TimeZone setting). Unfortunately, SME do not set it. You can specify your time zone. This setting will only affect Zabbix
• WebAccess: (local|public|disabled) From where you'll be able to access the web interface. You can set it to disabled if you want to disable the web interface (for example, if your server is a node of a distributed environment)
• access: (public|local) From where zabbix port will be available (controlled by TCPPort). You should restrict the access to a list of host with the AllowHosts key if you set public here.
• status: Should the service be started automatically ?

Once you have everything configured like you want, just issue

signal-event zabbix-server-update

to expand the templates and restart the needed services.

Web Interface

The main web interface is available (if not disabled with the key WebAccess) on https://server.domain.tld/zabbix. The default user is Admin (with uppercase A as first letter), with password zabbix (you should change this password ASAP)

Here are some screenshots of what you can get with zabbix

CPU Usage Graph

Memory Usage Graph

Network Usage Graph

	Note:
	You can select a period on any graph. With this great feature, you can easily zoom on a period of time to analyse things with hight precision

Incoming mails statistics

Screen

	Note:
	You can display as many graphs as you want in one screen, automatically refresh it, change it (display network graphs of hosts 1 during 2minutes, then display hardware graphs of hosts2 for 3 minutes etc...)

Triggers overview

Hosts Map

	Note:
	this is a very simple map, you can make it look nicer

For more screenshots, visit the project website here

Agent

see Zabbix-agent

Proxy

see Zabbix-proxy

Monitoring SME servers

If you want to monitor SME Servers with zabbix, you'll first need to install the agent as explained earlier, then configure the agent to accept connection from your server. For example, to monitor you local server (the one running zabbix-server):

db configuration setprop zabbix-agent Servers localhost active disabled passive enabled
signal-event zabbix-agent-update

	Note:
	After installation, the agent is configured for active checks only. Here, we disable the active checks, and enable the passive ones.

Then, just add a host in Zabbix, pointing to localhost.

Now you can start adding items (type agent (active or passive depending on the mode you use on the agent)) to this new host.

If you want to monitor SME Servers on the Internet and use passive mode, the server will initiate connections to the agent. You'll need to port-forward the port if you run in serveronly mode (the default is port 10050 TCP), or to open this port in the firewall if runing in server&gateway mode:

db configuration setprop zabbix-agent Servers w.x.y.z active disabled passive enabled access public AllowHosts w.x.y.z
signal-event zabbix-agent-update

	Warning:
	If you use active checks, you need to name the host in zabbix server hostname.domainname.tld (check the file /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf, the directive Hostname). If you don't do that, checks won't work

You can download here an archive with some XML exports of the templates I use to monitor my servers. Just extract the archive, and import the templates you want in Zabbix (using the Import/Export menu of zabbix configuration)

Each XML file represent a template in Zabbix

• Template_SME is the main template. It'll add a lot of items for global system monitoring, triggers if load is too high, lack of free memory, httpd is down, passwd has changed etc... and also some graphs like CPU usage, memory, disk space, network usage etc... This templates requires the Template_icmp and Template_app_MySQL template

• Template_SME_coovaChilli will add tun0 statistics (useful if you use CoovaChilli contrib). It'll also create a graph for tun0 stats

• Template_SME_softRaid will add items and triggers for software raid monitoring. If you link a SME Server with this template, you'll be warned if one of the raid array is degraded or rebuilding

• Template_SME_megaRaid will do the same but for MegaRaid based cards. It also requires the MegaCli utility from LSI website

• Template_SME_nutUPS: Will add items and triggers to be warned if your UPS is on battery, or overloaded.

• Template_icmp: will configure two items to check if the server is alive, and measure the latency. It also provides latency graphs and some triggers (if latency is too high, if host is down since more than 5min and if hosts is down for more than 1 hour)

Bugs

Please raise bugs under the SME-Contribs section in bugzilla and select the smeserver-zabbix component or use on of this link:

smeserver-zabbix-server

new bug for server

ID	Product	Version	Status	Summary (5 tasks) ⇒
12282	SME Contribs	10.0	CONFIRMED	Incorrect default charset for Zabbix database: "utf8mb4" instead "UTF8, UTF8MB3".
12281	SME Contribs	10.0	CONFIRMED	misisng font firectory in php base dir
12279	SME Contribs	10.0	CONFIRMED	missing deps
11747	SME Contribs	10.0	CONFIRMED	add SME specific templates
11743	SME Contribs	10.0	CONFIRMED	switch or at least configure ldap auth

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