Blog

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

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!

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: 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!

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 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.