Blog

Quadrata and Zabbix at CeBIT 2016!

We are proud to inform you that we will take part at CeBIT 2016 together with Zabbix!

Come to find us and discover last features of the new version 3.0 and learn how Zabbix can make your business safer and efficient.

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Zabbix 3.0 is here!

Here it is! The expected and desired Zabbix 3.0 is here with the fount of new features. Let’s skim them over and put them in practice. What were you awaiting the most?

 

Redesigned WEB interface

The frontend in 3.0 comes with a more modern design, being now more convenient and easier to use. The UI is now cleaner with some usability improvements, for example, Users section has been split into User groups and Users. Plus, all the minor adjustments, like the change in font face and size, lead to a more lightweight and user-friendly frontend.

zabbix-whats-new-3.0-dashboard

 

As regards a more modern appearance of Zabbix 3.0, now you have many themes for choice: the original light is a default theme, but you might also like the stylish dark.
blackwhite-blog

 

Daemon communication encryption and authentication

Encryption of traffic between all Zabbix components (server, proxies, agents and command-line utilities) protects from intercepting of data.

Encryption also provides authentication – only components with trusted certificate or pre-shared key can take part in communication. The authentication is mutual – e.g. not only Zabbix server examines agent’s certificate but the agent also can be configured to examine server’s certificate issuer and subject.

encryption-host-configuration

Encryption is optional and configurable for individual components (e.g. some proxies and agents can be configured to use encrypted communications with server while others can use unencrypted communications as before).

encryption-hosts

 

Forecasting and trend prediction

Problem prediction long before they occur – in Zabbix 3.0 this will turn into reality.

Some say, that even in 2016 disks are still filling up… To prevent applications suffering from free disk space shortage, Zabbix can predict when this situation is going to happen and warn in advance. So that one can add more disk space just in time before it really becomes an issue and causes any damage.

Future behavior of the monitored system will be determined based on the historic data. Plus, you can choose appropriate interval and forecast horizon.

Just see the example below, where Zabbix predicts how soon file system on /home will be full looking at the last hour values.

prediction-disk

 

And much more!

You can find a complete list of new features here:  http://www.zabbix.com/whats_new.php.

 

Quadrata è pronta!

Quadrata has made everything ready to support Zabbix 3.0! Contact us if you need any help!

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happy_new_year_2016
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2016

Hi friends,

we are near to a new year and we want say thanks to everyone that trust in us and Zabbix and a very special thanks to every guys of Zabbix Team.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (with a new release of Zabbix 3.0)

Zabbix postcard Christmas 2015

Zabbix postcard Christmas 2015

 

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OctoZab 0.2 alpha: control your server list!

Our brand new OctoZab project to manage multiple Zabbix servers has been recently updated.

In this version you’ll get a high demanded feature: the possibility to control which Zabbix servers are managed by OctoZab, along with custom credentials for each of them, directly from the frontend!

OctoZab Servers List

OctoZab servers list: add/modify/remove your servers

Moreover, as you can see from opening screenshot, layout aspect has been improved and revisited in order to give a more pleasant dashboard, and putting bases for features to come.

If you haven’t yet noticed, we’ve added a Docker container too, just to make easier for you to test and use the application.

As usual, you can check the source code at our GitHub repo.

Enjoy the update!

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Zabbix 2.5.0, first alpha release of Zabbix 3.0

Zabbix Team is pleased to announce the availability of Zabbix 2.5.0, first alpha release of Zabbix 3.0.

This release is absolutely not for production. It is a very early Alpha Release!

It is not yet feature complete and does not fully represent expected 3.0 version.

Upgrade notes

Link: Release Notes

zabbix_2.5

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OctoZab – Multi Zabbix Server Dashboard

Many of us are using Zabbix Server for a lot of customer and sometimes we need to monitoring what happen on every Zabbix Server but we can’t…. at least until now… Is born OctoZab

This is our first prototype of Dashboard and we need suggestions and feedback from Zabbix Community, so feel free to ask everything.

You Could find source at https://github.com/Quadrata-it/octo-zab

We also create a demo site please check it at http://demo.quadrata.it/octozab/

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Reliability of Zabbix proxies internal checks

Zabbix is a powerful monitoring tool, that can easily become hard to control with the expansion of the infrastructure underneath.

One of the many features it offers is proxies, useful to monitor geo-dislocated devices. We happened to check a not-so-small Zabbix installation for a customer of ours, made of 1 server and about 12 proxies. Some of these proxies were very work-loaded, and needed some fine tuning.

But before analyze which kind of items were monitored and how they were organized, we first had to understand if hosts on which proxies were working were healthy. That’s where some useful Zabbix metrics come into play: Internal Checks.

And that’s where we found a configuration error, with very small evidency if not checked in first place. All of the proxies were not monitored by themselves. What does this mean? That all of them shared same Zabbix server graphs, and was impossible to understand real behaviour of their internal, data gathering, value cache processes.

The solution? As showed in opening screenshot it’s enough to let them be monitored by themselves!

From then on, we were able to fastly identify slowness culprits and where to begin the tuning.

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Zabbix Certified Specialists – May 2015

I’m proud to announce our new Zabbix Certified Specialists of May 2015, if you want to become the next one please check the official zabbix training schedule.

zabbix_training_may_2015_mini

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zabbix housekeeping trouble
Zabbix and HouseKeeper Trouble Story!!

Today i want show a problem discovered on one of our Zabbix Server and the Housekeeper process.

Housekeeper (Zabbix documentation)

The Housekeeper is a periodical process, executed by Zabbix server. The process removes outdated information and information deleted by user.
Most of us know the two parameters inside zabbix_server.conf to limit the process behavior:

HousekeepingFrequency

The Housekeeper is a periodical process, executed by Zabbix server. The process removes outdated information and information deleted by user.
MaxHousekeeperDelete

No more than ‘MaxHousekeeperDelete‘ rows will be deleted per one task in one housekeeping cycle.
Actually for most of the times no one care so much about that but today we fall on a big Zabbix Server slow down and this problemi s coming from Housekeeper.
Today we understood much better the logic behind the Housekeeper process, i will try to explain below.
Few days ago we have removed 3 items prototypes from a template that it was linked to 60 hosts and for every hosts that prototype items is near to 300 real items.
So how many orphaned items we have? 3 (proto items) *60 (hosts)*100(expanded proto items)=18000 !
But the huge strange behaviour is here, MaxHousekeeperDelete. If we set to MaxHousekeeperDelete=500 zabbix will try to remove 500 history value per orphaned items.
So what happend?
In the beginning the Housekeeper process it will try to remove 18000×500=9.000.000 of history value!!!!
For example if we look on Zabbix server Log:
————–
housekeeper [deleted 68 hist/trends, 4522000 items, 0 events, 0 sessions, 0 alarms, 0 audit items in 2649.273207 sec, idle 1 hour(s)]
————–
The “4522000 items” is the deleted orphaned items value for a single Housekeeper process.
To discuss about this strange logic we have opened an official trouble ticket in Zabbix

zabbix housekeeping trouble

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SysDig – Dig in Linux and fix trouble

Never see a so great tool to debug our Linux server, please check this post How to monitor and troubleshoot a Linux server using sysdig

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New Zabbix Certified Specialist – 6-8 October 2014

I’m please to announce the new Zabbix Certify Specialists of october 2014, if you want to become the next one please check the official zabbix training schedule.

zabbix_training_6_ottobre_2014

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Zabbix MySQL DB Cleaning

Today i have found a big problem, my Trends table is very huge (>250GB) how can i fix this problem?
Digging on Internet i found an easy solution and it comes from our Zabbix Community 🙂

Link: Zabbix DB Cleaning

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Monitoring servers through HP iLO in Zabbix

Today i have found a lot of news about our Monitoring tool!
I have translated this very good article from a russian website, every award is for http://habrahabr.ru/, thanks so much.


Introduction

During the implementation of Zabbix in our very extensive infrastructure, I was faced with the need to monitor the hardware of a fairly large fleet of servers HP Proliant different models and generations regardless of operating system agents and HP. itself an idea suggested itself to realize all this through iLO, but the task proved to be far less trivial, what initially looked. As a result of its decision turned out pretty interesting design that:

  • Uses the discovery, saves us from having to manually set anything at all, except for the address iLO,
  • Monitors the temperature of coolers and food servers Proliant, ranging from 5 generations
  • Monitors the state of the memory and hard drive for servers Proliant, ranging from 7 generation
  • Collects general information for inventory – serial number, model number, firmware version.

Now exactly how this was done.
Seemingly simple: iLO can give data through IPMI, and Zabbix has native support for this protocol, but, as usual, was smooth on paper. When we look at the issue once there are three problems:

  1. Zabbix uses a library openipmi, in which there is a bug – a successful connection to iLO will only happen if it originated from the name of an account that has administrator privileges. From a security standpoint this is fundamentally wrong. You can solve this patch / update, but it does not eliminate the other,
  2. Removing information from discrete sensors via IPMI is not supported,
  3. And finally, for different models of servers keys, names and number of sensors differ. Make templates for each model by hand – very productive.

In connection with the foregoing, it was decided to write a separate mechanism for interaction with iLO, relying on scripts and other utilities to work with IPMI. As a programming language was chosen perl, as well as a data source – package freeipmi . On all servers in the wards iLO account was created to monitor read-only rights. Logically, the entire structure is divided into two parts:

  • Script detection data sources ilo_discovery.pl – iLO polls for the supported parameters and keys, parses them, and outputs a format understandable Zabbix,
  • Script retrieve data ipmi_proliant.pl – on request gives the value of a specific parameter.

Just want to note that perl programmer and I am not used to solve problems of those examples and designs that were clear to me, the end result was achieved – all this works successfully.

Detection script

This provides data in a script format zabbix discovery according to which class the data was requested – sensors, chassis information, and so forth. Such separation is due to the logic of the template that is used in conjunction with scripts.

ilo_discovery.pl

Script retrieve data

This script outputs the value of specific sensors – again, depending on what class of data has been requested. The obtained data is cached in a text file, so you do not accidentally zaddosit iLO simultaneous requests.

ipmi_proliant.pl

Template monitoring

Write scripts – half the battle. Had yet to properly configure the import of all of this information to Zabbix and configure the triggers. The result of this work was the monitoring template, which established rules for detecting all sensors and other data sources and automatically create a corresponding triggers and graphs.

Application in practice

For practical application of the above construction is necessary:

  1. Download the archive with the script and template import template Zabbix,
  2. Put scripts ilo_discovery.pl ipmi_proliant.pl and the folder specified as storage ExternalScripts config Zabbix, and make it executable,
  3. Download and install FreeIPMI (FAQ assembly and dependencies is here ):
# wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freeipmi/freeipmi-1.2.1.tar.gz
# tar -xvzf freeipmi-1.2.1.tar.gz # cd freeipmi-1.2.1 # ./configure –prefix=/usr –exec-prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –localstatedir=/var –mandir=/usr/share/man
# make install
For 64-bit systems configure line would be:
./configure –prefix=/usr –exec-prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –localstatedir=/var –mandir=/usr/share/man –libdir=/usr/lib64

  1. Create a user account for iLO Zabbix and prescribe its data in scripts ($ user and $ pass),
  2. Check that FreeIPMI successfully connects to iLO (address, username and password substitute your own):
# /usr/sbin/ipmi-sensors -D LAN2_0 -h 192.168.0.1 -u monitor -p P@$$w0rd -l USER -W discretereading –no-Header-output –quiet-cache –sdr-cache-recreate –comma-separated-output –entity-sensor-names
In response, we should get a list of sensors such as:
0,System Chassis 1 UID Light,OEM Reserved,N/A,N/A,‘OEM Event = 0000h’
1,System Chassis 2 Health LED,OEM Reserved,N/A,N/A,‘OEM Event = 0000h’
2,Processor Module VRM 1,Power Unit,N/A,N/A,‘Device Inserted/Device Present’
3,Power Supply Power Supply 1,Power Supply,N/A,N/A,‘Presence detected’
Check that the script successfully parses the data detection (substitute your address):
# /usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts/ilo_discovery.pl 192.168.0.1 sensor temp numeric
In response, we should get something like this:
{
data“:[ { “{#CLASS}“:“sensor”, “{#KEY}“:“Air Inlet 01-Inlet Ambient”, “{#SECTION}“:“Temperature”, “{#TYPE}“:“numeric”, “{#MEASURE}“:“C”}, { “{#CLASS}“:“sensor”, “{#KEY}“:“Processor 02-CPU”, “{#SECTION}“:“Temperature”, “{#TYPE}“:“numeric”, “{#MEASURE}“:“C”},
{
{#CLASS}“:“sensor”,
{#KEY}“:“Air Inlet 01-Inlet Ambient”,
{#SECTION}“:“Temperature”,
{#TYPE}“:“numeric”,
{#MEASURE}“:“C”},
{
{#CLASS}“:“sensor”,
{#KEY}“:“Processor 02-CPU”,
{#SECTION}“:“Temperature”,
{#TYPE}“:“numeric”,
{#MEASURE}“:“C”},
  1. In Zabbix front-end server, which we want to interrogate through iLO, iLO enter the address in the macro {$ ILO} (in the address field ipmi interface is nothing to indicate it is not necessary)
  2. Bind to the server template monitoring iLO
  3. Wait until fulfills detection.
Will look something like this section lastest data for node monitoring iLO:
Zabbix HP ILO IPMI
Charts on data obtained included:
Zabbix HP Ilo Graps IPMI

Conclusion

This monitoring mechanism has been successfully tested with HP Proliant server series DL, ML and BL 5, 6, 7 and 8 generations.General recommendation – try before applying it to update to the latest versions of iLO firmware. As for the younger line of servers, having on board instead Lo100 iLO – with them all this will work too, but some of the information obtained from the older models of the same generation, will not be available because lo100 sends less data than iLO.

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