Map configuration can be easily reached by navigating to Configuration | Maps | Create map. The resulting window that you will see is shown in the following screenshot:

Most of the properties are quite intuitive; the Name field needs to be a unique name, and Width and Height are expressed in pixels.

Now we will take a look at all the other parameters:

Starting with Zabbix 2.2, a new feature has been introduced. The map configuration feature provides you with the option of defining the lowest trigger severity.

With this configuration, only the triggers at the defined level or more will still be displayed in the map; this will reduce the number of triggers displayed, and all the triggers with a severity below the defined one will not be displayed. This section is highlighted in the previous screenshot within a green rectangle.

The level that you have selected within the map configuration can be overwritten when viewing maps in Monitoring | Maps by selecting the desired Minimum severity, as shown in the following screenshot:

The URL section is powerful, but here an example is needed because the usage is not intuitive and simple.

Now, if you see a trigger on fire or an alarm that is escalating, most probably the next action that you will take is to check the latest data of your host or jump to a screen that will group the graphs, triggers, and data that you need to check to have an idea of what is happening and do a first-level analysis. In a practical case of first-level support, once a server is highlighted and shows triggers with problems, it can be useful to have a link that will go straight ahead to the latest data of that host and also the screen. To automate this and reduce the number of clicks, you can simply copy the link of the desired page; for instance, the link to the latest data would be something similar to http://<YOUR-ZABBIX-SERVER>/zabbix/latest.php?sid=eec82e6bdf51145f&form_refresh=1&groupid=2&hostid=10095.

Now, looking into the URL to automate the jump to the latest data, you need to replace the variant part of the URL with the macros wherever available.

The sid value in the URL represents the session ID; it is passed to avoid the one-click attack, also known as session riding. This field can be removed. The groupid value in the specific latest data example can be omitted, so the URL can be reduced to http://<YOUR-ZABBIX-SERVER>/zabbix/latest.php?form_refresh=1&hostid=10095.

Now, the link is easy to generate. You can simply replace the hostid value with the macro {HOST.ID} as http://<YOUR-ZABBIX-SERVER>/zabbix/latest.php?form_refresh=1&hostid={HOST.ID}.

And configure the URL as shown in the following screenshot:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that there is a link configured to General Screen that collects the most important graphs. The http://<ZABBIX-SERVER>/zabbix/screens.php?sid=eec82e6bdf51145f&form_refresh=1&fullscreen=0&elementid=17&groupid=2&hostid=10094&period=3600&stime=20140807161304 URL is generated from the screen page of a particular host.

This time again, you can omit the sid value in the preceding URL since it specifies a period. If this parameter is absent, you will be taken to a screen that displays the last hour of data. You can also remove the stime, groupid, and elementid values. The reduced URL will be http://<ZABBIX-SERVER>/zabbix/screens.php?form_refresh=1&fullscreen=0&hostid=10094& groupid=2.

Now, to make it dynamic, you need to replace the values of hostid and groupid with the macros, such as http://<ZABBIX-SERVER>/zabbix/screens.php?form_refresh=1&fullscreen=0&hostid={HOST.ID}&groupid={HOSTGROUP.ID}.

The result of this customization is shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see, by clicking on the host that has issues you have two new shortcuts other than Latest Data and General Screen, with a link that is dynamically created for each host.

This kind of behavior allows you to create a master-detail view. In this case, the master is your map, and the detail can be, for instance, the screen or the latest data window. You can create custom menus that can run a script or bring you directly to the trigger status or the Host screens.

Once you have completed this setup, you can begin the nice part of the configuration. Once inside the map, the options that you will find is quite simple and user friendly, as shown in the following screenshot:

In the map, you can add an element by clicking on the + sign and remove it by clicking on the - sign. The element will appear in the upper-left corner of the map. By clicking on that icon, a configuration panel will appear, as shown in the following screenshot:

The element type, by default, is Icon. In the preceding screenshot, it is marked as Host, but it can be any one of the following:

The Label section is another strong point of the element. Here, you can freely write normal text or use macros.

The next field may vary depending on what you choose as the element type and can be one of the following:

Hosts and triggers have already been covered and are quite intuitive to understand. Probably, it is not immediately understood why we should insert a map inside a map. An efficient use of this scenario is that you can produce a nice drilldown with a general map view that gathers together all the submaps detailed per location or nation. This helps you to produce a drilldown until the final destination; for instance, try to think about a drilldown that comes from nations, down to the city, and deep into the data center, ending on the rack where your server is contained.

The Icon element inside a map is an image that can have a URL associated with. Their function is to add a graphic element to your map that contains the URL, and have the shortcuts directly on your own map.

Right after that, there is the Icons section. Here, if you checked the Automatic icon selection checkbox, icon mapping (defined in the map configuration) would be used to choose the icons to be used.

If you haven't defined an icon mapping or if you want to use an item different from the previous choice, you can specify the icons that will be used in those cases, which can be one of the following:

The Coordinates section expresses the exact location of the element in pixels and, as the previous item, you can configure a dedicated URL for this kind of host too.

Imagine that you have produced different kinds of screens (the screens will be discussed later in this chapter): one that collects all the metric graphs and triggers used to monitor an application server and another one with all the metrics needed to monitor the status of your database. Well, here, if your host is a DBMS, you can create a URL to jump directly to the RDBMS screen. If it is an application server, you can create a custom URL that will take you directly to the application server screens, and so on.

As you can see, this is an interesting feature and will make your map useful to your support team.

In the map configuration, you can select multiple elements by selecting the first one, and then, keeping the Ctrl (or Shift) key pressed, selecting the other elements. For a multiple selection, you can drag a rectangle area, which will then select all the elements in the drawn rectangle.

Once you have selected more than one element, the element form switches to the Mass update elements window, as shown in the following screenshot:

Here, you can update the icons, labels, and label locations for all the selected hosts in bulk.

To have an efficient update of all the labels, it is strongly advised that you use macros.

Now, it's time to inter link your servers in exactly the way that they are physically connected. To create a link between two hosts, you only need to select the hosts that need to be linked together and click on the + symbol in the Link section of the map.

The links section will appear right below the Mass update elements form, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can customize your link with labels and also change the representation type and color. You can choose between Line, Bold line, Dot, and Dashed line.

An option to keep in mind here is the possibility of connecting the link indicator to a trigger, so basically, the link will change its color once a trigger is on fire.

Previously, we discussed the Label section where you can customize the label in your graphs. Here, I think an example can clarify a lot the power of this section and how this can improve and introduce benefits in your maps. As an example, you can play with macros inside the map. Now, you have certain requirements for this, such as you need to show the hostname, IP address, the status of triggers events (the number of acknowledged events and the number of unacknowledged ones), and the network traffic of your network interfaces, directly in the map.

This seems challenging work and, in fact it, is, but if you have a bit of knowledge about macros, this becomes an easy task. The request can be satisfied with the following code:

{HOSTNAME}
{HOST.CONN}
trigger events ack: {TRIGGER.EVENTS.ACK} 
trigger events unack: {TRIGGER.EVENTS.UNACK} 
Incoming traffic: {{HOSTNAME}:net.if.in[eth0].last(0)}
Outgoing traffic: {{HOSTNAME}:net.if.out[eth0].last(0)}

The first macro, {HOSTNAME}, will display the hostname of your selected host. The second macro, {HOST.CONN}, will display the IP address. The information about the triggers events, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, is expressed in the next two lines using the macros {TRIGGERS.EVENTS.ACK} and {TRIGGER.EVENTS.UNACK}. The last two lines are more interesting because they are a composition of two nested macros.

In particular, to display the incoming traffic of your first network interface, you can ask Zabbix to retrieve the last value of the net.if.in[eth0] item. This kind of expression needs the hostname to be evaluated, so you need to write your hostname, that is, HOST-A (in this example) or use macros.

The last piece of information that Zabbix needs to produce as the requested output is the hostname. As mentioned earlier, this can be replaced with the {HOSTNAME} macro. So, the complete expression will be as follows:

Incoming traffic: {{HOSTNAME}:net.if.in[eth0].last(0)}

Obviously, for outgoing traffic, the expression is more or less the same, except that you need to retrieve the net.if.out[eth0] item of the network card. The result is shown in the following image:

This is a comprehensive and charming output, wherein, without any clicks, you have your needed information directly in your map. In this example, you used the last() value of your item, but the other functions are also supported here such as last(), min(), max(), and avg().

Macros can be used in the same manner on links; an example is shown in the following screenshot:

In the preceding screenshot, the traffic data on the link is generated using the same method that was previously explained. All those macro usages make your maps a lot more dynamic and appealing.