Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook
Second Edition
Explore the new features of Zabbix 6 for designing, building, and maintaining your Zabbix setup
Nathan Liefting
Brian van Baekel
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Zabbix 6 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook Second Edition
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First published: January 2021
Second edition: March 2022
Production reference: 1180322
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ISBN 978-1-80324-691-8
Foreword
Despite all the challenges brought to us in recent years, IT technology progress inevitably continues with increasing speed. No matter how far in the past we look, we can understand that IT nowadays is not like it was a year or two ago. For monitoring solutions, there is always an ongoing rush after new technology trends just to be able to support new solutions and comply with growing requirements from businesses that expect more and more from their monitoring solutions.
As an area that is covered in product growth, monitoring also becomes more saturated and flexible, which can also make it more complicated, especially for beginners that are just starting their journey in the world of monitoring. And thus, here comes the beauty of open source, where the community bands together and makes a huge effort to help each other with different ideas, approaches, and best practices. This collaboration with the community is what I try to take part in myself, by creating various videos about Zabbix functionality, monitoring ideas, and different use cases. It is important to understand that nobody will be able to provide a solution to any request, but our goal is to give insights into how to use tools that you should use to build solutions adopted precisely as per your needs.
Community drive and a feeling of one team who shares the same goals cannot be missed by anyone who works with the Zabbix monitoring solution. I'm sure that it is only because of the active community that I have had the chance to meet Brian and Nathan. Many years ago, when Brian was participating in a Zabbix certified specialist course, on day 1, he made it clear that his skills are far beyond an average specialist and even back then, he did his best to share his experience and help students who were on their first days with Zabbix. It is great to see that after all these years, the passion is still there. Now, with the tremendous help of Nathan and the huge experience gained by working with different Zabbix installations and different requirements, these guys have not only acquired a huge baggage of experience to share with you but have also learned the best ways to deliver this information to someone who may be far from an expert in Zabbix and monitoring.
I'm sure that for all of us, the main goal is to make Zabbix accessible to anyone in any place with any skill level. That is the purpose of my videos and that is the purpose of this book: to put all-out experience and lessons learned in one place for our community.
Dmitry Lambert
Creator of the Zabbix YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/ZabbixCookBook
Contributors
About the authors
Nathan Liefting, also known as Larcorba, is an IT consultant, trainer, and content creator (artist). He has more than 6 years of professional experience in IT. His experience ranges from managing networks running EVPN/VXLAN to Linux environments and programming. Nathan started working with Zabbix in 2016 when it was still at Zabbix 2 and Zabbix 3 was just released.
He now works for Opensource ICT Solutions BV in the Netherlands as a Zabbix trainer and consultant, designing and building professional Zabbix environments and Zabbix components for some of the biggest companies around the world.
Brian van Baekel quickly discovered how powerful Zabbix is during his career as a network engineer. Ever since, he has been working with Zabbix in various (large) environments, leading to his official Zabbix Certified Trainer certification in early 2017.
In 2018, Brian founded Opensource ICT Solutions BV in the Netherlands and Opensource ICT Solutions LLC in the US. Both companies primarily focus on building Zabbix environments all over the world. In 2021, further expansion of the business was established by opening a subsidiary in the United Kingdom with a full focus on the Zabbix product. All companies provide support, training, and consultancy services, which means Brian works with the Zabbix product 24/7.
Fun fact: Even his cat is named Zabbix.
About the reviewers
Patrik Uytterhoeven has about 20 years of experience in IT, mostly with HP UNIX and Red Hat Linux. In late 2012, he joined Open-Future, a leading open source integrator and the first Zabbix reseller and training partner in Belgium. When Patrik joined Open-Future, he also became a Zabbix-certified trainer. Since then, he has provided onsite training and public demonstrations around the world in Europe, America, and Asia.
His next step was to author a book, so the first Zabbix Cookbook was born. Because Patrik also has a deep interest in configuration management, he wrote some Ansible roles. Patrik was also a technical reviewer of Learning Ansible and Ansible Configuration Management. Later, Patrik rewrote the popular Zabbix network monitoring book by Richard Olups and Zabbix 4 Network Monitoring was born.
Roy van Baekel is an experienced network architect and Linux system administrator with more than 10 years of experience building internet service provider networks (MPLS, QoS, BGP, EVPN, and so on) and highly available Linux platforms (Apache, MySQL, Leepalived, KVM, and OpenStack). All these systems are as good as their monitoring capabilities, and as such, Roy has in-depth experience with common monitoring tools such as PRTG, Icinga, and Zabbix. Roy loves to automate repeating tasks – using tools such as Ansible or Puppet. With experience in multiple programming languages, everything is tied together to provide the best solution to customers.
Julio Daniel Zanette is a Christian and technology enthusiast with over 10 years of experience in information technology. Born in Brazil and moving to the UK in 2018, he graduated in information technology management. Having worked for many years as a Sysadmin and always looking for new knowledge and challenges, in recent years, he has moved to the DevOps role. Having been introduced to Zabbix in 2015, he soon began to call himself a Zabbix enthusiast. In 2017, he passed the certification exams for Zabbix Specialist and Zabbix Professional, and in 2019, he went to Zabbix SIA in Latvia for Zabbix Certified Expert training, returning home with the title of Zabbix Certified Expert.