If you are working with Zabbix or any other monitoring tool, you may be knowing a little about downtime costs. Downtime affects companies, products, and even the service's reputation. There is a lot of research that tells us that companies around the world lose a large amount of money because of system outages.
Probably, your company has services or products that depend on IT infrastructure. But the question is: what exactly do you know about these dependencies? Probably a little, but this isn't something that only you missed. Our experience shows that a lot of companies don't know about it.
In this chapter, we will try to explain how Zabbix works in most environments, and the common mistakes we tend to make. We will cover the following topics:
- Starting our journey
- Choosing the right tool
- The first wrong step with Zabbix
- A little about my first steps
- Good practices
- Simplifying Zabbix
- Challenges in Zabbix
- List of don'ts
- The beginning of the real challenge
Our journey starts when, say, you arrive at work on a sunny Monday (maybe a cloudy day), and your boss is waiting for you in the parking lot. The systems had an outage last night and you need a solution to predict this situation. Now what? Which way to run? Which tool to use? The first step is to try the Internet search engines. Some references will appear—some old, some not so well-known, and so on. But which one should you use? And how to choose the correct tool among so many of them? The specifications and presentations of each one are quite interesting. Apparently, some of them fit into your needs, but which one to use? There are pieces of software, tools, and platforms for all tastes, flavors, and budget sizes. What is your budget? Of course, the lowest possible! Do you have experience with open source? Do you know that the main tools of this type are already professionalized and there are companies that develop and provide support services for these tools? So why not follow this line (gain flexibility and achieve a deployment without exorbitant costs) and work with an open source tool to monitor the environment?