Hardware for a ZABBIX proxy

[Andreas Bollhalder]

I have installed the ZABBIX proxy 1.6.5 under Gentoo on an ALIX.3D2 and it is working fine as far I have tested it ;-) I haven't done any benchmarking, but I think for small locations with a handfull of hosts and not too aggressive monitoring, this device will be sufficient.

The system has a 500MHz CPU and 256MB RAM. My installation is using 470MB of disk and 30MB RAM. With ZABBIX agent and proxy running, it uses around 60MB of RAM. Ok, after some time, the cache buffers will consume more memory...

I used a 4GB CF-Card and did a compile of Gentoo Linux for the Geode platform. The whole system without the work cost less then 100 € ;-)

The website is:

http://www.pcengines.ch

I would advice:

• alix3d2 Systemboard
• cf4slc CF-Card 4GB SLC
• box2c Enclosure
• brk3c2 Bracket
• ac18veur AC adapter
• cr2032 RTC battery (You have to solder it by your self)

I forgot to order the RTC battery and when starting up or shuting down, Gentoo reports future time stamps and clock skews. The system itself seems to run fine. Will check if it disappears with the battery.

Update:
You also have to make a solder bridge on jumper J16, pin 1 and 2. And check, that hwclock is writing the time to the real time clock when shutting down or do it by hand.

Andreas

PS: Would be nice to have a dedicated forum relating ZABBIX and hardware.

[Alexei]

It seems to be much cheaper alternative to the Soekris hadrware. Thanks for the nice details!

[itworker2008]

PCEngines SBC performance

Andreas,

I would like to know how this hardware has been going, being used as a proxy. How is the performance? how many hosts can you monitor comfortably? I would like some insight before I purchase one to use as proxy. Thanks for your time.

I do have experience with Single board computers from Mikrotik/Routerboard, soekris, etc, but only in networking/wireless mesh devices, I haven't tried them with Zabbix proxy.

Thanks
Stephen -

[Andreas Bollhalder]

Experience with Alix

Hello Stephen

I have two remote proxies running on this boxes. The installation of the image onto a 4GB CF-Card is done from a virtual Gentoo machine.

The boxes are monitoring each around 200 - 250 items, simple and active checks, at interval of 30 - 60s. CPU usage is around 0.05% and the memory usage is below 50%. As far as I can tell, they are running fine.

I made a specific kernel for the Geode CPU and the Alix platform. Everything is compiled as 486 code with the Geode extensions and I installed only the binaries.

I don't know, how much resources IPMI or SNMP checks are consuming.

At the end, I'm happy with this box. It's cheap, small and doesn't eat to much "hay" or "oat"

Andreas

[Alexei]

I don't know, how much resources IPMI or SNMP checks are consuming.

SNMP v1 and v2 will be fine. SNMP v3 requires extra CPU power, so the Geode is not a good choice for a large number of checks per second. Not sure about IPMI though.

[Andreas Bollhalder]

Geode and SNMP v3

SNMP v1 and v2 will be fine. SNMP v3 requires extra CPU power, so the Geode is not a good choice for a large number of checks per second. Not sure about IPMI though.

Hello Alexei

What kind of algorithmus is SNMP v3 using ? Maybe, the Geode AES-128-Engine can help there ? As far as I know, OpenSSL can use it. But by nature, it's limited to the AES-128 only.

Andreas

[itworker2008]

SBC Option

Andreas, thanks for the quick reply. I would be monitoring wmi events from windows based machines, would this be sufficient still? or would these types of checks require more powerful hardware for the proxy? The wmi events I'm monitoring are very stripped down from a full WMI monitor. I am only monitoring about 10-15 key data points per workstation, in a 20-40 workstation environment.


Thanks

[Andreas Bollhalder]

WMI monitoring

Andreas, thanks for the quick reply. I would be monitoring wmi events from windows based machines, would this be sufficient still? or would these types of checks require more powerful hardware for the proxy? The wmi events I'm monitoring are very stripped down from a full WMI monitor. I am only monitoring about 10-15 key data points per workstation, in a 20-40 workstation environment.

I don't have experiences with WMI-Monitoring. Does the ZABBIX proxy do the processing of the WMI events or do you have a script on the workstation which only returns the values or use the ZABBIX sender/trapper ? Maybe in the future, the Event Log filtering will be included in the agent side. But as far as I know, the WMI isn't implemented directly in the client.

I think, you can try it. Sure, it depends on a lot of other values like frequency of WMI events and theyre text size. But the ZABBIX proxy only has to forward this event to the ZABBIX server.

Andreas

[itworker2008]

Does the ZABBIX proxy do the processing of the WMI events or do you have a script on the workstation which only returns the values or use the ZABBIX sender/trapper ?
Andreas

There is a zabbix agent on each workstation, I just put a template on the zabbix server, and all that info is collected. I will probably just purchase the hardware and give it a try, Thanks for your help.

[Andreas Bollhalder]

Ok, would be nice to hear how it is working.

Andreas

[Alexei]

What kind of algorithmus is SNMP v3 using ? Maybe, the Geode AES-128-Engine can help there ? As far as I know, OpenSSL can use it. But by nature, it's limited to the AES-128 only.

I have no idea if the engine can be used by net-snmp libraries. It would be nice if it worked.