A Closer Look

Actions

When a trigger occurs, a monitoring solution like Zabbix needs to trigger an event, such as emailing the on-duty admin. For this to happen, you must first select Administration  | Media types to set up an SMTP server. The Type field by default includes the Email , Jabber , and SMS types. If you want to send email when a trigger is tripped, click on Email and add the values for the SMTP server , SMTP helo , and SMTP email , where SMTP email is the sender address that Zabbix uses to dispatch the message.

If you then click on Media in the respective user login dialog, you can then press Add to add a new medium of the Email type and add the desired target email address in the Send to field. The checkboxes are used to set the severity level.

You can set up an action in the Configuration | Actions menu. If you select Triggers from the drop-down box beside Event source and then press Create action , the dialog for configuring an action appears. In the Action tab, you can compose a default message and enter a freely selectable name for the action. It makes sense here to use {TRIGGER.NAME} or {TRIGGER.STATUS} to access the variables.

Next, you can formulate the condition in the Conditions tab and define an operation by clicking on New in the Operations tab. The Operations type drop-down box offers a Send message option, among others. Pressing Add for Send to Users or Add for Send to User groups then lets you define the targets.

Better with Agents

In professional use, you may prefer the agent-based variant or, alternatively, perhaps SNMP- or IPMI-based monitoring over agentless monitoring. The excellent visualization functions below Monitoring | Graphs , Monitoring | Screens , and Monitoring | Maps are also worth looking at. Furthermore, Zabbix offers an Inventory menu with features that other manufacturers would sell as a standalone product.

Conclusions

Admins will particularly like the Zabbix web interface, which allows configuration of the host, items, and triggers, rather than just visualizing the monitoring results. With many add-ons and third-party tools available, including the loadable modules architecture added in version 2.2, Zabbix is at least on par with the Nagios ecosystem.

Zabbix's extensive visualization capabilities and the availability of templates as the basis for "applications" also speak in favor of this powerful tool. Despite the huge feature set, you will quickly find your way around the well-structured web interface, which remains clear despite the wealth of detail.