Calculated checks
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
Calculated items are items calculated based on data of one or more already existing items in the Zabbix database. All calculations are handled by the Zabbix server and will never be calculated on the agent or the proxy.
If you want to do this exercise, then you need a Zabbix server that is properly setup and linked to the standard Linux template. Of course, you can alter the items that we have used and use your own if you like.
- The first step is to go to the Zabbix server and create a new item on the host or in a template.
- Give the item a name, something such as
% free on root. - Select the Type,
Calculated. - Fill in the Key with a unique name, example
free.root. - In the field Formula, we add:
100*last("vfs.fs.size[/,free]",0)/last("vfs.fs.size[/,total ]",0) - Select
Numeric (float)as Type of information. - And in the Units field, place
%. - Those are the options we need to build our calculated item, so you can save it or give it an application first.
- Next we can go to Monitoring | Latest data to have a look at our new item.
A calculated item will calculate a new value from one or more items that already exist in the database. This means that the Zabbix server will calculate a new value of already existing data and create a new item for it.
In our case, we calculated the percentage of the free space on / by dividing the free space from our root filesystem with the total size from our root filesystem and then we multiplied the data hundred times. The last option in our example makes sure that we use only the latest data from our two items.
When we create calculated items, we always need a function, key and optionally some parameters:
func(<key>|<hostname:key>,<parameter1>,...)
We can make use of many different functions and are not limited to just the latest data. For instance, we can make use of avg, count, max, min, sum, and so on.
For a complete overview, have a look at this page in the Zabbix documentation.
https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.4/manual/appendix/triggers/functions.
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