Monitoring IT systems usually involves poking at lots of small details: CPU, disk, memory statistics, process states, and a myriad of other parameters. All of these are very important, and every detail should be available to technical people. But in the end, the goal of these systems isn't to have enough disk space; the goal is to serve a specific need. If we only look at the low-level detail, it can be very hard to figure out what impact the current problem might have on users. Zabbix offers a way to have a higher-level view, called IT services. Relationships between individual systems can be configured to see how they build up to deliver services, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) calculation can be enabled for any part of the resulting tree.

We'll cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Deciding on the service tree
• Setting up IT services
• Viewing reports
• Specifying uptime and downtime