This is a nice, simple screen, but there were many more available screen elements to choose from, so let's create another screen:

1. Go to the list of screens. If a screen is shown in the monitoring view, click on All screens, and then click on the Create screen button.
2. In the resulting form, enter Experimental screen in the Name field, enter 2 for both the Columns and Rows fields, and then click on Add.
3. In the screen list, click on Constructor next to Experimental screen.
4. Click on the Change link in the upper-left cell.
5. In the Resource drop-down, choose Simple graph, and then click on Select next to the Item field.
6. Select A test host from the Host drop-down.

As we can see, all the simple graphs that are available without any manual configuration can also be added to a screen. Here, click on the CPU Load entry. In the Width field, enter 600, and then click on Add. Click on the Change link in the upper-right cell. Choose History of events from the Resource drop-down, change Show lines from 25 to 10, and then click on Add.

Well, suddenly our graph doesn't look that great anymore—it should be taller to fit this layout. We could place it below the events list, but that would require deleting it and reconfiguring the lower-right cell. Well, not quite. Drag the graph to the lower-right cell and release the mouse button:

The element (in this case, a graph) is moved from one cell to another, requiring no reconfiguration of individual cells. The upper-left cell is now empty, so click on Change there. Select Triggers info from the Resource drop-down and Linux servers from the Group  box, select Vertical in the Style option, and then click on Add.

This screen element provides us with high-level information on trigger distribution by severity. Let's populate this screen even more now:

1. Click on the Change link in the lower-left corner.
2. In the screen element configuration, select Triggers overview from the Resource drop-down, and start typing linux in the Group field.
3. Click on Linux servers from the drop-down. We have more triggers than hosts in this group; select Top for the Hosts location option, and click on Add. The elements are misaligned again, right?

We'll try out some alignment work now. Click on the second + button from the top in the first column (next to the overview element we just added). This inserts a row before the second row. Drag the Triggers overview element (the one we added last) up one row, to the first cell in the row we just added. Click on the Change link for the History of events element (upper-right cell), enter 20 in the Show lines field and 2 in the Row span field, and click on Update.

Our screen now looks quite nice, except that the lower-left corner is empty.

Click on Change in that cell, select System info from the Resource drop-down, and then click on Add. The screen looks fairly well-laid-out now. Let's look at it in the monitoring view by going to Monitoring | Screens and clicking on Experimental screen in the Name column:

It was mentioned earlier that all graphs show the same time period in a screen. That is true if the graphs are added as normal screen elements. It is possible to add graphs that show a static period of time using the URL screen element, which allows us to include any page in a screen. In that case, the URL should point back to the Zabbix frontend instance. For example, showing a simple graph could be achieved using a URL such as http://zabbix.frontend/zabbix/chart.php?period=3600&itemids[0]=23704&width=600.

You can find out the item ID by opening the simple graph of that item and looking at the URL. Note that the width of the graph image should be manually adjusted to match the screen cell width and avoid scrollbars in the screen cell. This way, we could configure a screen that shows hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs of the same item.

As we discovered, screens in Zabbix allow very flexible visual layouts. You can choose to have a map, followed by more detailed graphs; or you can have graphs of the most important information for a group of servers, and a trigger summary at the top; or any other combination: there are many more possible screen elements to be added. It might be a good idea to try out all of the available screen elements and see what information they provide.