Now that we have seen how to add users, groups, permissions, and more, there is still some administration possible in Zabbix that is more general. As super administrator, you have the right to configure the GUI, housekeeper, regular expressions, and more. We will show you in this topic what more there is to configure and how to do it.
You probably know it already by now that you need a working Zabbix installation with a user that has super administration rights.
To be able to change the general configuration options, log in as super admin and go to the menu. Click on Administration | General, on your right side you will see a dropdown menu. The first parameter that you can configure is GUI.
In the following steps, we will show you how to change the GUI settings of your Zabbix configuration:
Let's have a look at the options:
- The first option to change our GUI menu is Default theme. We have the option here to select the default theme for our Zabbix installation from the list of themes.
- The Dropdown first entry option will let us choose when we select an element in a dropdown box, if it should display None or All. Remember selected box will remember our item selected and show this the next time we use the selection box.
- The Search/Filter elements limit option is standard on 1000. This when changed, will limit the maximum number of rows that will be displayed in a web interface list, for example Configuration | Hosts.
- The option Max counts of elements to show inside a table cell, on the other hand, will limit the entries that are displayed in a single table cell.
- Enable event acknowledges option will let us chose if events can be acknowledged or not in the Zabbix interface.
- While the option Show events not older than (in days) will limit the number of days for events displayed in the Status of Triggers screen. Default is 7.
- The option Max count of events per trigger to show will limit the number of events shown for each trigger in the Status of Triggers screen. Standard is 100.
- The last option Show warning if Zabbix server is down, will give us a warning on top of the browser if the Zabbix server is down or cannot be reached.
In the next steps of our recipe, we will explain you how to fine-tune the housekeeper settings in Zabbix:
- The first thing we see in housekeeping is Events and alerts option. Here we can enable or disable housekeeper for events and alerts. We can also change how long data is kept for triggers, internal data, network discovery, and auto-registration. Housekeeper will do it's cleanup using the days specified here. Even we have set different values for our triggers in Zabbix, we can override them globally here.
- Same goes for IT services, Audit, User sessions, History, and Trends. Here, we can choose to make use of housekeeper or not and choose how long we want to keep our data.
- For History and Trends, there is an extra option available: Override item history period and Override item trend period. When we select this box, values will be globally set. Remember that we can set them for every item individually; when this box is marked those values will be overridden.
- The button Reset defaults speaks for itself, when we push this button all variables will be reset. This means that any changes made will be undone.
In this part of our recipe, we will show you where we can add images such as backgrounds and icons in Zabbix:
- On top right, we have a dropdown box with Icon and Background. The icon box holds all icons that can be used in Zabbix maps.
- The Background type will show all backgrounds that can be used in Zabbix maps.
- Just above the dropdown box we have a button Create Image. This button allows us to add new icons and backgrounds to Zabbix.
Icon mapping is what we use in Zabbix in maps to automatically map certain servers with certain types of icons. We will explain you how icons can be mapped in our Zabbix setup:
- First box is Name; here we can put a name that we want to give to our mappings.
- Next we have our Mappings box where we see Inventory field, Expression and Icon. Here we can map an Inventory field with some icon in Zabbix based on a certain expression. For example, we could select OS in inventory field and for expression give Linux and use a server icon with a penguin. This way all Linux servers would get an icon with a penguin, so we would know easily in our Zabbix map that our servers were running on Linux.
Regular expressions can be used in Zabbix on certain places. Example: In low-level discovery we can make use of a regular expression on our filter for our filesystem.
- The first box is as usual, the Name for our regular expression. Later we use this name to refer to our regular expression. When making use of regular expressions we put the @ symbol in front of our expression name.
- The Expressions box is where we create our regular expressions. By pressing the Add button we get a box where we can write our regexp.
- When we have created our regular expression we can test it by going to the Test tab on top, next to Expressions. Here we can put a word in the Test string box and click Test expressions to see if our output is True or False.
Here we will define the system-wide macros. System-wide macros can be used in Zabbix by anyone and we call them with the macro name. Example:{$SNMP_COMMUNITY}.
In Zabbix we can create value maps. Value maps are a way in Zabbix to create a more human-readable format for the data that we have collected. Example: when our Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) returns the value 1, we can map this in Zabbix with Battery OK. This way we know when our UPS returns the value of 1 that our battery is OK.
- When we click Create value map, first thing to do of course, is give a name to our value mapping.
- In the field Value, we put the value that we want to map. Based on our example with the UPS this would be 1.
- In the next field Mapped to, we will put the value that we want to see. In our case this will be Battery OK.
When you see this box, you probably think that this option is to determine when Zabbix will be available to people and not. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this box, we put our working hours, but the time and days from this box will be used in our graphs. In our graphs, the working time will have a white background while the non-working hours will have a grey background.
- In the box Working time we put the working time based on the following format:
- d-d,hh:mm-hh:mm : where d is the day of the week, h stands for hours and m for minutes.
- It is possible to put multiple periods together. This can be done by separating them with a semicolon ;. For example: In the week from 9 till 17 h and in the weekend from 9 till 12:
- 1-5,09:00-17:00;6-7,09:00-12:00
Remember when we build triggers in Zabbix, we need to add a severity level to the trigger we have build to let us know how bad our issue is. The names can be changed in Zabbix but the amount of severity levels cannot be changed:
- In the box Custom severity, we can give a new name to each severity. However, custom severity names affect all locales and require manual translation!
- In the box Colour, we can click on the color and choose a new color or we can put the HTML color code in the box, if you know this from your head.
- The Reset defaults button will reset all changes made and revert back to the original settings.
The colors for acknowledged and/or unacknowledged events can be customized and blinking can be enabled or disabled. Also, the time period for displaying OK triggers and for blinking upon trigger status change can be customized.
The Other parameters is a collection of other parameters in Zabbix that can be altered. Those settings don't really belong into a specific group, so they were brought together under the name Other parameters:
- Our first box Refresh unsupported items (in sec) will try to refresh our unsupported items in Zabbix every x number of seconds. When we put 0, automatic activation will be disabled.
- The option Group for discovered hosts will place hosts discovered by network discovery and agent auto-registration automatically in the group selected here.
- The option User group for database down message will inform the group selected here in case of a disaster when the database is down. When the database goes down Zabbix will start sending alarms until the issue is resolved.
- The option Log unmatched SNMP traps when enabled, will log all SNMP traps if no corresponding interface was found.
Under Administration | General we have a lot of settings in Zabbix that we need to check. Some of the settings are for the frontend but others are there to make sure Zabbix keeps working (housekeeper), while other settings are needed to make our life more easy and filter certain unwanted data (macro's and regexp). All these settings can only be set as a super admin user in Zabbix. It's important that you spend some time on these settings as you probably will have to work a lot with regexp, macros, maps, triggers, and so on once you set up Zabbix in production.