We have finally reached the end of our journey to mastering the Zabbix monitoring system. In the course of the book, you learned how to plan and implement the general monitoring architecture; how to create flexible and effective items, triggers, and actions; and how to best visualize your data. You also learned how to implement custom agents by understanding the Zabbix protocol and how to write the code to manipulate every aspect of Zabbix through its API. In this chapter, we barely scratched the surface of what's possible once you start taking advantage of what you now know about Zabbix to integrate it better with your IT infrastructure. Many more integration possibilities exist, including getting and updating users and groups through an identity management system, getting inventory information through an asset management system, feeding inventory information to a CMDB database, and much more. Following the steps necessary to integrate Zabbix with a trouble ticket management system and integrate the Zabbix monitoring solution with external and different media, you learned how to prepare two systems such that they can share and exchange data and knowledge of how to use each system's API in a coordinated manner in order to get the systems to talk to each other. During our walkthrough, we also covered and analyzed all the critical security aspects in order to make you aware of the risk that a monitoring system can introduce and how you can mitigate them with a proper setup. At this point in the book, you're now able to implement and set up a segregated and secured monitoring system.

Our hope is that with the skills you just learned, you will be able to bring out the full potential of the Zabbix monitoring system and make it a central asset of your IT infrastructure. In doing so, your time and effort will be repaid many times over.