Network Monitoring Using Zabbix - A Comprehensive Guide

Network
Monitoring
Using Zabbix

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction....................................................................................................................2
1. Introduction...........................................................................................................................2
1.1 Background...................................................................................................................4
1.2 Research Aims and Objectives....................................................................................11
1.3 Proposed Structure of the Study..................................................................................11
Chapter 2: Literature review..........................................................................................................12
2. Literature Review...............................................................................................................12
Chapter 3: Exploring ZABBIX......................................................................................................19
Chapter 4: Research Methodology................................................................................................34
4. Research Methodology.......................................................................................................34
4.1 Research Approach......................................................................................................34
4.2 Research Design..........................................................................................................34
4.3 Ethical Consideration..................................................................................................34
4.4 Limitation of the Study................................................................................................35
Chapter 5: Zabbix Configuration for Monitoring Services...........................................................36
5. Zabbix Configuration for Monitoring Services..................................................................36
Chapter 6: Zabbix Configuration for Monitoring SNMP Devices................................................38
6. Zabbix Configuration for Monitoring SNMP Devices.......................................................38
Chapter 7: Usage of Zabbix in IT-ITES industries........................................................................42
7. Usage of Zabbix in IT-ITES industries..............................................................................42
Chapter 8: ZABBIX-PRTG Comparison.......................................................................................54
8. ZABBIX-PRTG Comparison.............................................................................................54
8.1 HOW TO MONITOR ZABBIX..................................................................................57
8.2 HOW TO MONITOR PRTG......................................................................................58
8.3 COMPARISON OF ZABBIX AND PRTG NETWORK MONITOR.......................60
Chapter 9: Conclusion and Recommendations..............................................................................61
9. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................61
9.1 Recommendations.......................................................................................................63
9.2 Limitations of the research..........................................................................................64
References......................................................................................................................................65
1

Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Introduction
Zabbix was originally developed by a Russian called Alexei Vladishev, CEO, Product managers
and architect. Zabbix has a permanent team of 40 members which has its head office in Riga
while offices also exist in various there cities like Tokyo and New York. The business model of
the Zabbix is based on providing various services, development, training, technical training, and
turnkey solutions to multiple people (Anon 2019). Zabbix is a universal open-source made for
enterprise level monitoring solutions that can monitor ten thousand devices at a time while on
either side, it can accumulate TBs of history data in day to day operations of the companies.
Zabbix works in two modes namely; pull and push mode. In the push model, it works as an
active agent while in the pull model; it works as a passive agent. Moreover, pull mode provides
various other facilities of service checks like HTTP, VMware, SSH, NTP, and IMAP while script
execution can be completed through SSH and Telnet. In the push model, it's greatly capable of
monitoring log files and event logo in the windows enabled devices.
Method of detection
With the help of the method of detection, we match it with the norm which has been a system
state earlier. Here, the average number of the transaction appears two times less than the average
number of transactions a week ago for the same time period (ABDUL HAMID et al. 2011).
People want to know eagerly about the same, where it can give reactions like an automated
process of query recommendation, sending alerts to various groups and an unlimited number of
reactions are also possible.
It can send a repeated notification to users while delayed reactions can also occur sometimes.
After failing the automating system, the notification can also be missed and a different type of
escalation can also exist at any time. One major release occurs usually in 6 months while LTS
releasing may occur in every 1.5 years.
2

Reporting Large Environment Zabbix Database
The main motive to discuss is the extraction of vital ZXabbix information to make perfect
decisions through consolidated data which is called the reporting. The data warehouse will help
in consolidating the data with some improvement. In BI, we retrieve, transform, analyze and
report data. In the large environment, servers will have more than 10,000 items, while some
servers will also have more than then thousand triggers. Besides, there are more than 100 Zabbix
administrators also work in developing the application templates. With about 1 million items,
about 14,000 servers also exist that makes a complex ecosystem for efficient business operations
Issue (Albdour 2017). The most common problem in such circumstances is providing huge
information at a time by which you can lose prominent visibility drastically needed for the
companies during their operations. This is also known as the tree hides the forest, in French.
Reporting greatly helps in this section while Zabbix has not any such facility. You'll have to go
for developing your own reporting architecture to get a consolidated view on the data all the time
and efficient operations.
Example: Data Checker in Zabbix
Zabbix data checker helps teams in getting to make correction in the templates through the
transmission of the various reports for the poor Zabbix templates configurations. The first part is
of reporting components are; Zabbbix database schema, SQL vs API, BI: Jasper Suit and
location of information reporting. The second part is of the reporting architecture consists of the
monitoring data warehouse, jasper server, report / Jasper Studio, While the third part is of the
reports where summary, reports, Zabbix information checker, and yearly trends are included
(Alip et al. 2018).
These various reports for the teams are responsible for the operation of an application. These
teams are in charge of Zabbix templates development and also often overlooks due to the lack of
knowledge.
API vs SQL
3

Usually, most of the API requests are safe and thus convenient with the Zabbix database schema.
However, they're not ideal in the complex environment where the requirement of the data is
huge. In this case, triggers table size may go more than 1 gigabyte (Andrey et al. 2009).
1.1 Background
Resource Monitoring
Before knowing what monitoring of resources is, Understanding what resources are valuable. It
is possible to identify resources as CPU, memory, bandwidth, as wll as storage. "Resource
monitoring was, at its easiest, nothing other than data about the use of one or even more program
resources". Resource monitoring was important in several system administration situations as
assets impact system performance in a way that requires careful management of assets.
There is now a requirement for monitoring VMs to our project as well as for discovering
resources throughout the cloud (Arlitt & Williamson 2004). You could also done use the
Hypervisor API to explore resources throughout the cloud environment. And then our method
will be limited to such a specific hypervisor so we're using a resource tracking tool to monitor a
cloud pool of resources in which we don't depend on a hypervisor that CloudStack uses.
Ganglia
Ganglia is really a resource tracking system that enables great performance computing systems
like clusters as well as grids to be monitored. XDR, XML (External Data Representation) as well
as RRDtool of storage or virtualization can be used for its data representation (Asmunin &
Khamdani 2016). Ganglia considers reducing overhead resource utilization on the hosts and
therefore provides different data structures & algorithms for achieving them.
4

Ganglia Architecture [22].
Ganglia relies on even a multi-cast listening / advertising protocol to track cluster status [22]. It
utilizes heartbeat texts in a well-known multicast address in a cluster to check the availability of
resources. Every node monitors the local resources and will be sent to the above listed multicast
address by multicast packaging including tracking data. Ganglia tracks each packet and uses a
tree for point-to-point links to federate numerous clusters together as well aggregate the state.
Ganglia implementation comprises of, gmetad (Ganglia Meta Daemon), gmond (Ganglia
monitoring Daemon) gmetric, as well as a library on a client side (Atanasov & Ruskov 2014).
Gmond offers single-cluster tracking as well as gmetd gives multi-cluster federation. Gmetric is
indeed a command line program which can be used to publish application-specific metrics or
provides access to various Ganglia features throughout the Clientside library.
5

Ganglia Implementation [22].
Nagios
Nagios is a resource surveillance instrument that helps to maintain track of parts of apps,
facilities as well as infrastructure. Nagios operates with measures that include surveillance,
warning, response, reporting, servicing and scheduling. It notifies clients when activities go
wrong as well as warns them a second moment whenever the issue has been fixed (Badger
2008). Nagios has been initially intended to operate under Linux, but that also works well with
the other UNIX versions. This is an open source authorized under the conditions of part 2 of the
GNU General Public License as released by the Free Software Foundation.
Nagios tracks assets like network parts, servers and many other facilities as a typical asset
surveillance instrument. Whenever a critical element falls, it gives warnings to system
administrators so that they can deal with the problem. Such warnings may be clustered by
urgency and afterwards administrators might choose to operate on them to fix those (Calheiros et
al. 2010). Reporting is also held out by Nagios where it might be useful to verify the accessibility
of a specific asset and to evaluate SLA's. There's also a scheduling part in which the needed
enhancements are specified in an infrastructure where changes are predicted.
6

Nagios Architecture
Figure provides the architectural design of Nagios. Distributed surveillance systems will monitor
facilities or asset stores and all these nodes will be controlled by a main server that maintains
record of all dispersed devices (Chen & Ma 2012).
Nagios safety checks the networks in the infrastructure regularly. There have been three regions
that can be recognized as
 Unknown
 Warning
 Critical
When such places shift notifications are being sent so that the administrators understand that
there's an urgency and they must respond.
Zabbix
7