Comprehensive Overview of Zabbix: The Ultimate Open Source Monitoring Solution

all right how's it going y'all today I'm very excited because we are going over probably the most powerful monitoring

solution zavix zavix is completely open source and is able to monitor pretty much everything and anything under the

sun it is phenomenal and really easy to use once you kind of get the understanding for it and it is designed

to scale to thousands upon thousands of servers and just be able to do pretty much anything you need I've been

implementing it for about 2 years now and I finally got the hang of it and it's been awesome I get email

notifications if one of my client's VMS starts to get too full on space or one of the startup utilities does not start

on Windows there are so many things it can monitor and what makes it incredibly powerful are the templates pretty much

you can set up all these amazing complex finds without doing anything at all because there's already templates built

for them another thing that makes it really great is it is really designed to go around firewall rules and be able to

work however you need it to work you can open up ports on either end and it will work and you can also have proces and so

it's just a really really really powerful solution and one of the best things about it is it's open source so

even if you do choose to pay for support because you're a large organization and paying somebody's support is absolutely

worth that Savings in Engineers time you don't have to so say one day that zavix decides to raise the rate something

crazy you're not locked in it's open source so you can just walk away and continue to use everything just without

sport it is something that I really like that model of Open Source but paid support that allows you to just kind of

know hey they don't have complete and total control over me which has happened with a lot of things where they go huh

we can start making a lot more money if we just charge people twice as much and they're already locked in so what are

they going to do no you can get around all that stuff because you know you have a way out all right so first off what is

this video this video is not going to be an installation guide it is going to be

instead me going over how to install on different clients it's going to assume you've already stood up a zabic server

or you just want to see the features of it if you want I will absolutely do a tutorial on how to install zapex on a

server but it's actually pretty easy and this is really going to be going over the basics on how to get setup for

either your home lab or your business for any of your monitoring needs as well as some kind of lessons learned that

I've gone throughout the years and kind of figured out with because it's incredibly powerful but you've got to

kind of understand the workflow otherwise you can end up burning a lot of time doing kind of useless things all

right so now let's talk about what zavix is and what you should use it for and really what I see the key benefits of

zavix are zavix is a monitoring solution it is essentially a application that you can run that can monitor pretty much any

computer any computer server iot device virtual machine web website pretty much anything in that realm it is designed to

monitor I will say one thing I really would not recommend using it to monitor something like a laptop or a desktop

something that's coming on and off all the time unless you've got some very specific rules and really want need that

kind of thing because you'll do that and then all of a sudden all your data is going to be watered down because devices

are going to be offline left and right and that's not that big of a deal because it's a desktop they're going to

shut off at the end of the day or whatever so that's the one thing I would not recommend monitoring it with it but

really anything that's designed to be up 24/7 it's great to monitor all right so now what is monitoring and what is it

really useful for so I really see three major things that zapex allows me to do that are huge the first and by far the

most important is problem detection automatic problem detection that is so because of an awesome feature of zapex

that's really centralized a thing called templates it is incredibly easy to set up monitoring and problem notification

for pretty much any device I'm going to talk about templates later on this video because it's a key part of zapex but it

makes it so that if you want to monitor a Synology and you want to get a notification if too many users have

logged in at a single time or if the main storage volume starts running out of space that is able to be done

incredibly quickly all because of templates the template's pretty much out of the box detect all the things on the

server and set up monitoring on them so if certain thresholds are met defined by the template it can send you a text

message an email notification just pop up a thing on the screen so many different things all very easily so the

number one reason I use it and I use it a lot for clients is I get email notifications if anything weird is

happening so if somebody starts running out of space on one of their virtual machines I get an emailed there instead

of them going hey what's going on here I can just immediately go and hey I'm going to fix this really quick before

it's actually an issue which is huge and the next really nice thing are the graphs so specifically for kind of event

correlation and figure out what happened after the fact so say somebody says hey I tried to use the nas yesterday and I

just could not Video Edit off of it because it was lagging so slow or say they're like hey I tried to go to your

website and it was taking a really long time for loading times to come in or anything like that well you just come in

here and these are all pre-built by a lot of the templates and I can just click on the graphs for my web server

right here and I can just look at everything under the sun with it so let's look at the last seven days so I

did a migration here but let's look at the last two days and we can see all the different pieces in here we can check

out and figure out okay what was going on during this why was it slow different pieces that can really

help you understand where the problem was and so say you want to isolate this specific time well we can just zoom in

there and boom all of the graphs now are going to be focused on that so this right here was when a backup was running

and so there's so much stuff in here that I can just tell what happened and what was going on this right here is

www.s space.co hosted in AWS and I'm monitoring all the data right here and so that's really number two is just the

ability to graph and really do postevent correlation and figuring out why something is not working great instead

of spending hours looking at all these different pieces and having to do with a physical machine you can get a feel for

what was going on just by looking at these graphs and finally number three is going to be customization so zapex comes

with a lot of stuff pre-built in but also leaves the door open for scripting so if you need to monitor it and you can

script it you can add it to zabic almost across the board and so that's one really nice thing about zavix that

really brings it home is the ability to customize it and bring all the stuff in customized for an exact setup so those

are really the big three things that zavix kind of sells itself on and why I think a lot of people really enjoy it

specifically it's got a ton of other features it's got Maps Discovery Services inventory it's got a bunch of

stuff in there that is very very powerful but those are the three things that I really think stand stand out and

make it very valuable for people to implement all right so now let's talk about the really key components of zabic

zapex has the server that's what you can run on virtual machine Docker whatever and that's where all the data ends up

and that's where it's got the nice web interface and everything like that it's what's doing all the event detection all

of that kind of stuff so that is the zabic server so then how do you get the data so that's where there's different

options here the most common being zabic agent so zabic agent is a program that is run actually on the server itself

that you want to monitor sorry I said server there twice on the virtual machine you want to monitor on the

device you want to monitor whatever it is the zabic agent can run on that and so that is where it's fully customized

and it can bring out pretty much anything under the sun and you can make it do whatever but a lot of things like

a network switch or a semy Nas don't really support just out of the box installing random software on there and

for stuff like that you've got agentless monitoring so the big thing that most people are going to be using is going to

be SNMP polling because that is pretty much the open standard that a lot of devices work with that are like hey if

you need to monitor me I have all these different SNMP parameters and you can look at sonies there's tons and tons and

tons of them and so almost everything that is a appliance and really designed for more server grade stuff will be able

to be monitored by SNMP most UPS's that have network cards on them have SNMP monitoring and so all that stuff can

really easily just come into zabic and have templates for that finally other common agentless monitoring that I

actually use all the time is web monitoring so web monitoring is awesome so I can just go into my

space.co web server click on it this is a super simple check and it's just got hey this is the overall throughput of

the website and this is the response time when it's just going to a very simple page I think this is loading the

homepage and just checking how fast it is and so you can see I did a migration a few days ago right here to New AWS

instance and the throughput went through the roof it was insane how much faster this is and the configuration of this

also works where if the SSL certificate does not have a proper date or name on there for whatever reason this fails and

I get an email notification which is huge because there's so many little things like that you don't want to set

up and do but instead it's just all done automatically and so that's web monitoring there's a bunch of other

options you can see right here a lot of stuff here but really what I would say you're mostly going to be using is SNMP

and web monitoring or just having the zabic agent directly on there or if you're really big smart home guy you

might be able to get mqtt running and set that up that's the whole thing and so I'm going to do two demos towards the

end of the this video going over how to use SNMP to monitor a syy Nas and I'm also going to go over how to actually

use zapex agent to monitor a web server installed in AWS but as you can probably tell from this if you've got something

you need to monitor you can monitor it with zavix all right and so now we're going to go on to the single most

important thing you need to understand when using Zex and that is templates templates are something that you really

need to just dive into immediately and that is all you should be using for the first very long time that you're using

zabic until you really understand everything everything should be a template for you you should always be

using pre-built templates and maybe customizing them a little bit for your specific needs and that is going to be

your best experience using zapex and so if we go into configuration templates you can just search for pretty

much anything under the sun in here and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of records pre-built out and if

you need to import them you've got the ability to really import custom templates from the web so there's a lot

of people who have built templates and the zavix forums are full of them and so you can use those pre-built templates to

easily just use those to monitor anything you need to Monitor and you'll also notice right here I've got a few

different custom ones built right here and that's actually something I would really recommend doing when you start

out the way I I've kind of set everything up is is I take the standard template and then I link it to my own

custom one and so that way anything I want to customize on my template so say the Linux template monitors this every 5

seconds and I only want to monitor it every 10 seconds I can just go in and update my version of that template and

all my devices are going to update and so I don't have to change the main template I can keep that the same but

I've got my own custom one that everybody already uses them so I'm just going to open this guy up right here and

so templates have a few Key Parts up here with the most important being items items are everything you are monitoring

so a template will start by having items right here but they can also get added in Via Discovery rules that I'm going to

talk about in a minute here but items are anything you're monitoring if you are checking the CPU

temperature that is an item anything that you are monitoring is an item and that is kind of where all the data is

stored so right here you can see how everything works out but this is not all the items that are actually going to end

up in there you'll notice there's nothing to do with anything with hard drives or anything like that that's

because those are actually added via Discovery rules so Discovery rules are used to discover anything that is

scalable or just things that it doesn't know they don't want to prepopulate all these lists that might not be there so

for example an easy one to understand is discs they have no clue how many discs you have when you start out there's no

reason that they should assume you have 55 discs in the nas so instead they have Discovery rules and the way this works

is there is a key and so the zavix agent says Hey Synology how many discs do you have that's this right here then for

every single dis that is returned it creates four different items as you can see here four different triggers and a

graph and so let's look at the items that creates it does the basic things it adds

the model number the status the temperature and the type so really basic things and you can see they all have

different times that they're updated obviously you're not going to check if it's a SATA drive or SSD every hour

instead you just check once a day and the same thing for the model but you probably want to know the temperature a

lot more often than that and so that is why you've got different intervals as well as how long they are kept for and

so that is the other way you get items you get items built off of Discovery rules and so that way these templates

are incredibly flexible all somebody has to do is figure out how to get there and then they can have everybody's devices

scale to however many items they have in there which is really useful in some cases with ZFS you can have thousands of

discs and so it just scales with however many discs you have and so the next really important thing to see are

triggers and we'll just go up to the default trigger triggers up here and so once again triggers can get added in the

same way items are from Discovery rules and so triggers are what are used to tell you if there's a problem and so

every single trigger has its own severity associated with it and so if it triggers and it creates a problem this

is going to be that and they go from not classified so nothing I guess at the bottom all the way up to disaster

and they're colorcoded by that and you can give warnings by that so it's very powerful and so you can see these are

all the pre-built triggers so for example if your system partition goes critical it's going to throw a disaster

warning on there and so these are all set up here to have different levels of warning and just really easily built out

ways to understand it the last thing are graphs graphs are pretty easy to understand they essentially just take

certain items and will graph them and you can also have graph prototypes and so when we look at my stack I showed you

all those different graphs of everything that was based off of all of the these different graphs there's also dashboards

that people can add in as well if you want to kind of centralize all of your stuff so say you're monitoring a

database and you want to put all the key database parameters on One dashboard instead of having them look at all the

different graphs you can also add a dashboard there and then there are web scenarios

which is how you do web monitoring but we're not going to talk about that in this case all right so that is the

overview of templates items and just the the general way things are set up all right so now let's let's figure out how

to monitor a new device and I'm going to pull up my DS 923 plus so for this we're going to be using

SNMP because we don't want to just install zapex right on the anology because it's not really supported

something weird might happen instead sonology has the thing called SNMP that pretty much most appliances will have

that are kind of designed for Server spaces and to do that we just go into SNMP and we just enable SNMP

service so for the highest security we will use snmpv3 and we will just add in a user

name and password we can just make this up we call it zabic and say zabic is

great really these do not have to be super secure passwords and not these are going to be available as plain text and

so that way we've got the ability to use SNMP I would not use SNMP over the internet if you do have a device you

want to monitor via MP I would recommend setting up a proxy on that Network and then using that just because SNMP is not

really something you want just traveling over the Internet even though it's got privacy it's not really encrypted and so

I'm just going to set those two things up and hit apply so now I've set that up and I'm

ready to go so let's go into our hosts and we will add in another host by hitting create

host host name this can be anything we want for this case specifically we'll call it DS 923 and visible name allows

you to have it whatever when you're using actually the zabic agent this host has to match what is in the file so

that's why there's a visible name here as well and once again the most important piece the template we're just

going to have it sonology and search so I've got this syy Nas mod and then host groups it's pretty much just however you

want to be organized a file servers yeah file servers and this is space Rex because this is my own ones and so you

can just organize however you like there for interface this is where you've got the different options so we're going to

be using SNMP and we can give it either a IP or DNS name we'll use the

IP which is 106 our SNMP version we did off no privacy

and so for the security name we said it was zapex so we go back over here it was zapex and I believe I said zapex is

great so then we said for our auth no privacy it is z and then you can disable or enable use

bulk request depending on how it works I've disabled it for a lot of anies and I found it works better but it's kind of

test and check all right so now we should be added on in here we go ahead and refresh it so we

can see right here it did come in and this green means it is currently working so we can go into latest data we're not

going to see much here just because it's not run and so you see everything's on its timers and everything but that is

where we've got everything we're going to have a couple of graphs they're not going to be that useful yet but as time

goes on we will see more and more stuff in here so sometimes I will kind of jump start it by going to configuration hosts

and going down into DS 923 and if you go to the Discovery rules you can click them on and hit execute now so that way

you don't have to wait for it automatically to run and then the stuff will get pre-loaded in there much

quicker but it'll just automatically do it as time goes on and so you can see without

anything just enabling that one setting everything's been created and we've got all the stuff added on in there it is

very very very easy to add in and we can see a ton of stuff already added in here and there's a lot more we can actually

check and figure out if we need to these were all just pre-built and I really did not have to do much of anything at all

to get this working and so that's how you can easily add a Synology in there and we can also just see what problems

are pre-built over here by going into the hosts and actually going into the triggers section and so we can see that

it's already set up all these different triggers for pretty much anything it's monitoring all of our disc smart data it

has so much stuff that was already built out and set up for us that I didn't have to do it all it's just all done

automatically really really really great and so with templates you're just good to go all right and so now for the

next one we're just going to show how you install this on a Linux box or anything like that this also works with

Windows servers but any servers you've got where you actually can install the agent on and I'm going to show that this

works over networks by really quickly just doing demo on how to set this up on like an AWS instance so I'm just going

to SSH into a instance I've set up and this is running on AWS light sale so what we can do is we see that we

are currently running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS so that's actually my go-to of choice so now we want to install zabic on there so

what I'm going to go in is I'm just going to go into the zabic Zab x.com and hit

download and they've got these great ones so we want to do the zavix package because we're actually installing it

using apt I'm running zavix 6.2 you want to make sure this one's the same as what you're currently running and Ubuntu just

say which version it is say we want the agent or agent to depending on which one you

want and you literally just execute this code so I'm just going to copy it in and we're going to run it

so that really quickly just went in and grab the package now we're going to use D package to actually enable it so I'm

going to run pseudo and now we're just going to run a pseudo apt

update we are just following the instructions on here and they work great and now we just need to do pseudo

app install so now zapex is installed so now I just need to go in and change a couple

configurations so I'm going to do pseudo Nano Etc zavix zavix agent d config and there's just a couple of

pieces we need to change in here so really all you need are a few pieces and they're what's called

mandatory so there's two different options you can either do passive or active checks so for Passive what you

would do here is you would give the IP or the DNS name if you've got reverse DNS lookups which is kind of complicated

but I did it on this and this right here is where you've got the ability to choose what your server is so this is

the server or proxy's IP address that is actually coming in so this is where the server reaches out to the actual device

itself to run so I'm actually going to go ahead and not use that at all so I'm going to just leave that as 1 72.0 Z1

because instead I'm going to be using active but if you wanted to you could use

passive and now we go down to the active checks so now we can say the server active so I'm going to say zx

space.co and this is going to be the IP address of my house or wherever the zapex server is we're going to add the

port of one51 so what this is doing is this is

taking the virtual machine and it's going to be sending data out so that way I can just put something in my port

foring rules that say Hey from the space Rex web server right here allow this to go into my server so this right here is

just the IP address of your zapex box wherever it is and that's it the last thing you always need to do is add add

in your host name so I'm just going to call this demo and this has to match whatever is in your table so you just

need to make sure that this matches whatever you put in there and that's really all we need to add in here

there's a bunch of other stuff you can do but that's really all you need you need to either do active or passive you

can do both if you want to and now we just need to set up the firewall rules so I'm just going to actually set this

to what my real one is okay and so now I just wrote the file and now we just just need to execute the next two pieces

restart the zapex agent and enable it on boot so now I just need to update my

firewall rule so that that incoming zabic agent packet can come into my network from that IP address so I'm just

going to do that now in the background and then we're going to pop back in all right so now I've just allowed that into

my firewall and so we should be good to set up so now all I need to go ahead and do is go in and add another

host all right so now since I'm doing the active only one I'm not going to get as much data but it's great if you don't

have really good firewall rules so if you're running your main agent at home and your IP address may change often

this is great so another thing you can do if you really want to use the passive checks which give you a little bit more

granular information and it runs a little bit faster in terms of hey as soon as you know it's down it's down but

you don't have a IP address where your server is like me you can easily spend up a $3.50 AWS instance on AWS light

sale and use that as a proxy and that will have a static IP address that's actually what I do and so that way I get

around that but we're just going to be using the active version and so we're going to add in the host name this has

to match what we put in there and for our template we are going to use Linux and they've got one on here for template

OS by agent active right here and we do have to Define an interface even though it's not really

used and now hit add and now we're going to have to wait up to 2 minutes before we get any data

whatsoever and so because we are using just active checks you'll notice that right here we are grayed out because

it's unknown if we've got access to the agent but if we look in here right here we can see our active checks are there

the screen available means we are getting data out of there though it is just going to be a check-in and we're

going to wait so now our graphs should have started to load in so we can go back into monitoring hosts and see it

right here and dashboard and we're going to see pretty much no information because not much has been populated but

we can see right here all that good stuff is starting to come in and that's how you monitor it

there are a zillion more things to do and it definitely needs its own tutorials you've got the ability to add

email notifications and so much more stuff but I think this is where I'm going to cap it because this is really

where the basics are and really where you can start to understand how to get everything set up and running if you

have any other questions please put those down in the comments below and check out space rex

for.co because that's where I'm going to be answering all the really complex question put an account over there it's

been a blast so far and that way it's actually searchable rather than having it really annoying where I can have 12

replies to the same YouTube comment and nobody will ever see him ever again all right have a good one bye

he [Music]