Beta12 Newbie Questions

[ZippySLC]

I managed to get beta12 installed and running. Looks good so far, and I am happy to have an alternative to Nagios.

I have some real newbie questions. I looked through the docs and didn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I'll post them here.

1. In the docs, under initial configuration it tells you to configure the SMTP server. I can't seem to find that in any of the config options.

2. I can get a host to monitor itself using any of the pre-defined templates. But say I want to have a host be monitored for things across several templates. Do I create a host entry for each, or make a new template with those checks for each host?

3. Say I just want to do things like ping check a server to make sure it's alive, check HTTP to make sure it's up, etc. How do I go about doing that?

4. Is it proper form to use the FQDN as the "name" or use that as a "friendly name" and use the IP address of the box? Or does it matter?

Thanks for a (seemingly) great product!

[erisan500]

Hi, welcome to the world of Zabbix

Lemme try to answer your ?'s,

1. In the docs, under initial configuration it tells you to configure the SMTP server. I can't seem to find that in any of the config options.

Log into the zabbix gui, click configuration -> general. On the right you'll see a dropdown box, select "Media types", then click on "Email"

2. I can get a host to monitor itself using any of the pre-defined templates. But say I want to have a host be monitored for things across several templates. Do I create a host entry for each, or make a new template with those checks for each host?

I'll come back to that later

3. Say I just want to do things like ping check a server to make sure it's alive, check HTTP to make sure it's up, etc. How do I go about doing that?

For ping, add an item with key: agent.ping (Zabbix Agent (active))
For HTTP, add an item with key: http (Simple check)

4. Is it proper form to use the FQDN as the "name" or use that as a "friendly name" and use the IP address of the box? Or does it matter?

If you use the FQDN in the name field you don't need the "Use Ip Address". If however you want to give your hosts more meaningfull names, you can put whatever in the "Name" field and check the "Use IP address" and fill in the ip address.

Hope this is an answer to your questions.

[Pablo]

Hello,

I haven't a smtp server installed in the same machine of zabbix. Are there any way to configure an external authenticated smtp server?

I saw this link but it's a bit old:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1323

Is this the simplest way to do it?
Thanks
Pablo

[erisan500]

Look at my reply to the first question in the post above.

[Pablo]

Thank you again. I'm looking for it in the user tab.

[ZippySLC]

Thanks for the reply. I found the area to enter my email address in. I am assuming that Zabbix will only use the local SMTP server on the box. It would be nice if I could get it to use an external server.

I also believe I answered my own question about setting up things to check on each machine. Am I right in assuimng that you would go to:

Config > Items > (Host in the Dropdown Box) > Add the various checks I want.

Is there a walkthrough on how to properly configure Zabbix? Sort of like a newbie guide?

I've played with a bunch of monitoring programs and most of them seem overly complicated. Zabbix seems like it's better than most, but it does seem a bit overcomplicated. The best program I have worked with so far is the commercial "IPMonitor" software. It's pretty powerful in when you create the host, there are various checkboxes that you can fill in to activate various checks. In addition, more complicated checks (like SNMP polling) can be configured afterwards.

Of course it costs you, but the really nice thing is you can have a comprehensive monitoring solution built inside a day without too much prior knowledge of the product.

Zabbix could probably be like that, but (at least in my opinion) it's a little too cryptic right now. I wouldn't mind learning it and helping document things better, though.

[dantheman]

I agree, for a newbie it seems really complicated, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of good instructional directions to get started, to understand how it to use it.. but once you get past that, it's an excellent monitoring solution.