I recently attended a Zabbix partner meeting in London (with Zabbix and their top UK partners presenting). This was ideal as it gave you plenty of opportunity to as questions and gain better insight in what you could do with Zabbix.
You may ask yourself what is Zabbix?
The all-in-one, open-source solution that lets you monitor anything. This platform is designed to monitor millions on metrics in real time, collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines, network devices and applications – to name a but a few features.
This is how Zabbix described the event:
Zabbix Meeting the United Kingdom is designed to guide you through Zabbix solution and company, covering different examples from useful business-cases and Zabbix services. It will allow you to familiarize yourself with Zabbix principles, team, customers, and professional services that Zabbix and its partner provides in the United Kingdom.
Event Overview
This slide presented caught my attention.
I was impressed with the number of things you could monitor as you can see from the above picture. The key takeaways for me from the event were for me:
- You could deploy Zabbix proxies to remote sites (customer sites) that could communicate back to Zabbix server. Zabbix support unlimited proxies.
- Control all Zabbix proxies from a single pane of glass.
- Monitor behind the Firewall and DMZ
- They say download and get started in 10 minutes.
- Automatically discover and create your hosts in Zabbix.
- None of the data collected is transferred to Zabbix or any 3rdparty.
- Data collection can be agentless and using Zabbix agent.
Data visualization network maps this was a big one for being able to see your whole network and where problem was in your network.
They also talked about some case studies one of which was a clothing retailer who had Zabbix monitoring the door entry system which count the number of customers coming through the doors. On a normal day by 10am they would have say 1000 customers walk in to the shop. On this particular day IT noticed the door system was showing zero customers going into shop, so they called the store to check. The staff advised we had had no customers. They got one of the staff members to walk out of shop to see what was going on they noticed Scaffolding and building works was going on and had blocked the stores sign and visibility of shop entrance. So, they got a sign made up saying we are open as usual and put in front of building work, customers returned to store. They did mention more IT related case studies but this one just made me think what we can monitor or should be monitoring.
This was quite an unusual event in some ways as the partners and Zabbix were all sharing what they were doing in order to build the Zabbix community in the UK.
My own lab experience
One of the Partners attending was Qnetix who are a UK based company that offers a managed Zabbix solution – www.qnetixmonitoring.com. They provided me a free trial of their Managed Zabbix Service. Installation was easy and I was up and running in about 15 minutes. They provide you with your own Zabbix instance (that they host) and a gateway appliance (VMware OVA in my case) that you deploy in your environment. Qnetix also helped me get going and provided me with an overview of the Zabbix platform using my own systems – this is where is started to come to life for me on the power of what these guys have done.
Here are some examples of my own home lab:
Zabbix monitoring VMWare in my home lab
Zabbix monitoring my firewall performance in my home lab
Zabbix alerting (including via email) for key events happening in my home lab
The team I dealt with at Qnetix were very good – both knowledgeable on Zabbix and VMware and very helpful in getting my Zabbix environment up and running.
Qnetix Special Offer
Qnetix have offered a six month free Zabbix hosting to UK VMUG members. To get activated, go to www.qnetixmonitoring.com, sign-up and quote Homelab23 as the promo code. I highly recommend you try this solution, it works especially well with monitoring VMware private cloud platforms.