New To Zabbix- Seems Complicated

[durgadas]

I'm brand new to Zabbix and this system reminds me of using Solaris- absolutely NOTHING works unless specifically configured to do so. I feel a bit overwhelmed since I've tried a few other systems which automated basic things like Discovery, etc.

Any encouragement would work to get me started. On first blush, it seems overly complex to me.

[Alex.S]

Hey there! Welcome to the forum.

Zabbix supports discovery out of the box: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...work_discovery

As for the "nothing works" part, could you please be more specific?

[bertterbeest]

I completely get that you feel overwhelmed by Zabbix at first try. I had the same when I tried it first many years ago. Nowadays I would not want to go to another application because of the fact that you state that it does require a lot of configuration at first is also its power in the end. Not one scenario I had was unsolvable with custom checks and extending the use of Zabbix while other monitoring applications often lock you in.

I'd actually recommend Zabbix because of its complexity. Especially if you are not new to monitoring in general, Zabbix is a breath of fresh air letting you configure things how you like them.

The community and sources available on the Internet are also great. Often times there are templates that you can simply load into it from the Cookbook for example.

I also recommend reading the book: Mastering Zabbix - Second Edition

[DmitryL]

Got you covered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LOyNqRmwZs&list=PL0mpo4XDX5eEPHQQWmqHEaSvjasShee_A

https://www.youtube.com/c/ZabbixCookBook

[xz77777777777zx]

Your videos are great and have been a huge help. Keep up the great work!

[jpInMN]

We just recently started using zabbix for our cloud infrastructure. In our on-prem datacenter hosted systems we're currently using ipmonitor and solarwinds server and application monitoring. At first I had the same thought as you, it didn't really seem very user friendly. After you get the hang of some of the concepts, it's pretty slick. We have everything automated from start to finish. We use terragrunt/terraform to deploy the db, an app server, and web server behind a load balancer so we can add more if needed and take one down for patching, etc... Then we use ansible to add all of our items/triggers/actions/users. The only thing we haven't figured out (without doing a direct db query) to setup wit the automation is the ldap settings.

If there are any specific things your'e having issues with, ask and I'm sure you'll be able to get some help.

[rubenjimenezit]

During this quarantine I've been reading the book "Mastering zabbix" by Andrea Dalle Vacche and with the help of the official documentation I've been able to setup my enviroment by myself, so I can recommend this book to you.

[provels]

FWIW, I'd suggest one of the prebuilt VMs. At least then, you have the environment and can then muddle through the config.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zab...test%20Stable/
I'm only a hobbyist and use it on my own home network, and started only about a month ago. I can do a heck of a lot more now than when I started and have subscribed to the RSS for the forum. Still, 75% of the posts I don't understand, LOL. Good documentation here, too. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/4.4/manual
I might suggest sticking to one of the 4.4 versions for the time being. Nothing against 5.0, but you could come up against a problem involving a x.0 release. "Oh, yeah, that..."

[bbrendon]

You could always start with Zabbix v2.x and slowly upgrade as you get comfortable with it. It just gets more and more features.

[Alex.S]

You could always start with Zabbix v2.x and slowly upgrade as you get comfortable with it. It just gets more and more features.

2.x is not supported anymore and there had been plenty of changes since, so the latest release should be the optimal choice.