3. High Availability and Failover
by Andrea Vacche, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Rihards Olups
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Table of Contents
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Credits
- Preface
- I. Module 1
- 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
- The first steps in monitoring
- Zabbix features and architecture
- Installation
- Summary
- 2. Getting Your First Notification
- 3. Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols
- 4. Monitoring SNMP Devices
- 5. Managing Hosts, Users, and Permissions
- 6. Detecting Problems with Triggers
- 7. Acting upon Monitored Conditions
- 8. Simplifying Complex Configurations with Templates
- 9. Visualizing Data with Graphs and Maps
- 10. Visualizing Data with Screens and Slideshows
- 11. Advanced Item Monitoring
- 12. Automating Configuration
- 13. Monitoring Web Pages
- 14. Monitoring Windows
- 15. High-Level Business Service Monitoring
- 16. Monitoring IPMI Devices
- 17. Monitoring Java Applications
- 18. Monitoring VMware
- 19. Using Proxies to Monitor Remote Locations
- 20. Encrypting Zabbix Traffic
- 21. Working Closely with Data
- 22. Zabbix Maintenance
- A. Troubleshooting
- B. Being Part of the Community
- 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
- II. Module 2
- 1. Zabbix Configuration
- 2. Getting Around in Zabbix
- 3. Groups, Users, and Permissions
- 4. Monitoring with Zabbix
- Introduction
- Active agents
- Passive agents
- Extending agents
- SNMP checks
- Internal checks
- Zabbix trapper
- IPMI checks
- JMX checks
- Aggregate checks
- External checks
- Database monitoring
- Checks with SSH
- Checks with Telnet
- Calculated checks
- Building web scenarios
- Monitoring web scenarios
- Some advanced monitoring tricks
- Autoinventory
- 5. Testing with Triggers in Zabbix
- 6. Working with Templates
- 7. Data Visualization and Reporting in Zabbix
- 8. Monitoring VMware and Proxies
- 9. Autodiscovery
- 10. Zabbix Maintenance and API
- C. Upgrading and Troubleshooting Zabbix
- III. Module 3
- 1. Deploying Zabbix
- 2. Distributed Monitoring
- 3. High Availability and Failover
- Understanding high availability
- Understanding the levels of IT service
- Some considerations about high availability
- Implementing high availability on a web server
- Configuring the Zabbix server for high availability
- Implementing high availability for a database
- Summary
- 4. Collecting Data
- 5. Visualizing Data
- 6. Managing Alerts
- 7. Managing Templates
- 8. Handling External Scripts
- 9. Extending Zabbix
- 10. Integrating Zabbix
- D. Bibliography
- Index
Now that you have a good knowledge of all the components of a Zabbix infrastructure, it is time to implement a highly available Zabbix installation. In a large environment, especially if you need to guarantee that all your servers are up and running, it is of vital importance to have a reliable Zabbix infrastructure. The monitoring system and Zabbix infrastructure should survive any possible disaster and guarantee business continuity.
High availability is one of the solutions that guarantee business continuity and provides a disaster recovery implementation; this kind of setup cannot be missed in this book.
This chapter begins with the definition of high availability, and it further describes how to implement an HA solution.
In particular, this chapter considers the three-tier setup that we described earlier:
- The Zabbix GUI
- The Zabbix server
- Databases
We have described how to set up and configure each one of the components on high availability. All the procedures presented in this chapter have been implemented and tested in a real environment.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Understanding what high availability, failover, and service level are
- Conducting an in-depth analysis of all the components (the Zabbix server, the web server, and the RDBMS server) of our infrastructure and how they will fit into a highly available installation
- Implementing a highly available setup of our monitoring infrastructure
High availability is an architectural design approach and associated service implementation that is used to guarantee the reliability of a service. Availability is directly associated with the uptime and usability of a service. This means that the downtime should be reduced to achieve an agreement on that service.
We can distinguish between two kinds of downtimes:
To distinguish between scheduled downtimes, we can include:
- System patching
- Hardware expansion or hardware replacement
- Software maintenance
- All that is normally a planned maintenance task
Unfortunately, all these downtimes will interrupt your service, but you have to agree that they can be planned into a maintenance window that is agreed upon.
The unexpected downtime normally arises from a failure, and it can be caused by one of the following reasons:
- Human error
- Hardware failure
- Software failure
- Physical events
Unscheduled downtimes also include power outages and high-temperature shutdown, and all these are not planned; however, they cause an outage. Hardware and software failure are quite easy to understand, whereas a physical event is an external event that produces an outage on our infrastructure. A practical example can be an outage that can be caused by lightning or a flood that leads to the breakdown of the electrical line with consequences on our infrastructure. The availability of a service is considered from the service user's point of view; for example, if we are monitoring a web application, we need to consider this application from the web user's point of view. This means that if all your servers are up and running, but a firewall is cutting connections and the service is not accessible, this service cannot be considered available.
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