If you are reading this book, you have, most probably, already used and installed Zabbix. Most likely, you did so on a small/medium environment, but now things have changed, and your environment today is a large one with new challenges coming in regularly. Nowadays, environments are rapidly growing or changing, and it is a difficult task to be ready to support and provide a reliable monitoring solution.
Normally, an initial deployment of a system, a monitoring system, is done by following a tutorial or how-to, and this is a common error. This kind of approach is valid for smaller environments, where the downtime is not critical, where there are no disaster recovery sites to handle, or, in short, where things are easy.
Most likely, these setups are not done by looking forward to the possible new quantity of new items, triggers, and events that the server should elaborate. If you have already installed Zabbix and you need to plan and expand your monitoring solution, or, instead, you need to plan and design the new monitoring infrastructure, this chapter will help you.
This chapter will also help you to perform the difficult task of setting up/upgrading Zabbix in large and very large environments. This chapter will cover every aspect of this task, starting with the definition of a large environment until using Zabbix as a capacity planning resource. The chapter will introduce all the possible Zabbix solutions, including a practical example with an installation ready to handle a large environment, and go ahead with possible improvements.
At the end of this chapter, you will understand how Zabbix works, which tables should be kept under special surveillance, and how to improve the housekeeping on a large environment, which, with a few years of trends to handle, is a really heavy task.
This chapter will cover the following topics:
- Knowing when you are in front of a large environment and defining when an environment can be considered a large environment
- Setting up/upgrading Zabbix on a large environment and a very large environment
- Installing Zabbix on a three-tier system and having a readymade solution to handle a large environment
- Database sizing and finally knowing the total amount of space consumed by the data acquired by us
- Knowing the database's heavy tables and tasks
- Improving the housekeeping to reduce the RDBMS load and improving the efficiency of the whole system
- Learning fundamental concepts about capacity planning bearing in mind that Zabbix is a capacity-planning tool
Since this book is focused on a large environment, we need to define or at least provide basic fixed points to identify a large environment. There are various things to consider in this definition; basically, we can identify an environment as large when:
- There are more than one different physical locations
- The number of monitored devices is high (hundreds or thousands)
- The number of checks and items retrieved per second is high (more than 500)
- There are lots of items, triggers, and data to handle (the database is larger than 100 GB)
- The availability and performance are both critical
All of the preceding points define a large environment; in this kind of environment, the installation and maintenance of Zabbix infrastructure play a critical role.
The installation, of course, is a task that is defined well on a timely basis and, probably, is one of the most critical tasks; it is really important to go live with a strong and reliable monitoring infrastructure. Also, once we go live with the monitoring in place, it will not be so easy to move/migrate pieces without any loss of data. There are certain other things to consider: we will have a lot of tasks related to our monitoring system, most of which are daily tasks, but in a large environment, they require particular attention.
In a small environment with a small database, a backup will keep you busy for a few minutes, but if the database is large, this task will consume a considerable amount of time to be completed.
The restore and relative-restore plans should be considered and tested periodically to be aware of the time needed to complete this task in the event of a disaster or critical hardware failure.
Between maintenance tasks, we need to consider testing and putting into production upgrades with minimal impact, along with the daily tasks and daily checks.