Zabbix 5 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook

Nathan Liefting, Brian van Baekel

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800208452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

Discover practical recipes to help you efficiently monitor enterprise IT infrastructure for Windows, Linux, and networkingKey Features• Find out how you can leverage some of the most exciting features of Zabbix 5• Perform professional IT infrastructure and application monitoring on multiple platforms• Discover easy-to-follow, practical solutions to problems in network monitoring with ZabbixBook DescriptionZabbix offers useful insights into your infrastructure performance and issues and enables you to enhance your monitoring setup with its variety of powerful features. This book covers hands-on, easy-to-follow recipes for using Zabbix 5 for effectively monitoring the performance of devices and applications over networks. The book starts by guiding you through the installation of Zabbix and using the Zabbix frontend. You'll then work your way through the most prominent features of Zabbix and make the right design choices for building a scalable and easily manageable environment. The book contains recipes for building items and triggers for different types of monitoring, building templates, and using Zabbix proxies. As you advance, you'll learn how to use the Zabbix API for customization and manage your Zabbix server and database efficiently. Finally, you'll find quick solutions to the common and not-so-common problems that you may encounter in your everyday Zabbix monitoring work. By the end of this Zabbix book, you'll have learned how to use Zabbix for all your monitoring needs and be able to build a solid Zabbix setup by leveraging its key functionalities.What you will learn• Explore the different types of monitoring available in Zabbix 5• Find out how to build your own Zabbix templates• Use Zabbix proxies for effective load balancing/scaling• Work with custom integrations and the Zabbix API• Set up triggers and alerting with Zabbix 5• Maintain your Zabbix setup for scaling, backups, and upgrades• Discover how to perform advanced Zabbix database management• Monitor cloud-based products such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and DockerWho this book is forThis book is for IT engineers who want to get started with Zabbix and anyone with an intermediate understanding of Zabbix looking to extend their knowledge. Although not necessary, prior experience with Zabbix will help you to make the most of this book.

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Zabbix and User Management

There have been quite a few changes to the Zabbix UI since 4.4 and earlier in this Zabbix 5 release. This book has been written completely with Zabbix 5, but while reading, you'll find some information detailing the differences between 4 and 5.

In this chapter, we will install the Zabbix server and explore the Zabbix UI to get you familiar with it. We will go over finding your hosts, triggers, dashboards, and more to make sure you feel confident diving into the deeper material later on in this book. The Zabbix UI has a lot of options to explore, so if you are just getting started, don't get overwhelmed. It's quite structurally built actually and once you get the hang of it, I am confident you will find your way without issues.

We will also work on creating our first user groups, users, and some advanced user authentication as a bonus. This way, we will make sure we have a structured Zabbix setup before continuing on with this book. You will learn all about these subjects in the following recipes:

• Installing the Zabbix server
• Setting up the Zabbix frontend
• Using the Zabbix frontend
• Navigating the Zabbix frontend
• Creating user groups
• Creating your first users
• Advanced user authentication with SAML

Technical requirements

We'll be starting this chapter with an empty Linux (virtual) machine. Feel free to choose a RHEL or Debian based Linux distribution. We will then setup a Zabbix server from scratch on this host.

So before jumping in make sure you have your Linux host at the ready.

Installing the Zabbix server

Before doing anything within Zabbix, we need to install it and get ready to start working with it. In this recipe, we are going to discover how to install Zabbix server 5.

Getting ready

Before we actually install the Zabbix server, we are going to need to fulfill some prerequisite requirements. We will be using MariaDB mostly throughout this book. MariaDB is popular and a lot of information is available on the use of it with Zabbix.

At this point, you should have a prepared Linux server in front of you running either an RHEL- or Debian-based distribution. I'll be installing CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 20 on my server; let's call them lar-book-centos and lar-book-ubuntu.

When you have your server ready, we can start the installation process.

How to do it…

1. Let's start by adding the Zabbix 5.0 repo to our system.
   For RHEL-based systems, use the following:
   rpm -Uvh https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/5.0/rhel/8/x86_64/zabbix-release-5.0-1.el8.noarch.rpm
   dnf clean all
   For Debian-based systems, use the following:
   wget https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/5.0/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_5.0-1+focal_all.deb
   dpkg -i zabbix-release_4.5-1+focal_all.deb
   sudo apt update
2. Now that the repo is added, let's install MariaDB on our server.
   For RHEL-based systems, use the following:
   dnf install mariadb-server
   systemctl enable mariadb
   systemctl start mariadb
   For Debian-based systems, use the following:
   apt-get install mariadb-server
   systemctl enable mariadb
   systemctl start mariadb
3. After installing MariaDB, make sure to secure your installation with the following command:
   sudo /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation
4. Run through the secure installation setup and make sure to remember your password.
5. Now, let's install our Zabbix server with MySQL support.
   For RHEL-based systems, use the following:
   dnf install zabbix-server-mysql
   systemctl enable zabbix-server
   systemctl start zabbix-server
   For Debian-based systems, use the following:
   apt-get install zabbix-server-mysql
   systemctl enable zabbix-server
   systemctl start zabbix-server
6. With the Zabbix server installed, we are ready to create our Zabbix database. Log in to MariaDB with the following:
   sudo mysql -u root -p
7. Enter the password you set up during the secure installation and create the Zabbix database with the following:
   create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;
   create user zabbix@localhost identified by 'password';
   grant all privileges on zabbix.* to zabbix@localhost;
   flush privileges;
   quit
8. Now we need to import our Zabbix database scheme to our newly created Zabbix database:
   zcat /usr/share/doc/zabbix-server-mysql*/create.sql.gz | mysql -u zabbix -p zabbix
   Important note
   At this point, it might look like you are stuck and the system is not responding. Do not worry though as it will just take a while to import th...

Table of contents

• Zabbix 5 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook
• Why subscribe?
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Getting Started with Zabbix and User Management
• Chapter 2: Setting Up Zabbix Monitoring
• Chapter 3: Working with Triggers and Alerts
• Chapter 4: Building Your Own Structured Templates
• Chapter 5: Visualizing Data, Inventory, and Reporting
• Chapter 6: Using Discovery for Automatic Creation
• Chapter 7: Setting Up Zabbix Proxies
• Chapter 8: Integrating Zabbix with External Services
• Chapter 9: Extending Zabbix Functionality with Custom Scripts and the Zabbix API
• Chapter 10: Maintaining Your Zabbix Setup
• Chapter 11: Advanced Zabbix Database Management
• Chapter 12: Bringing Zabbix to the Cloud with Zabbix Cloud Integration
• Other Books You May Enjoy