Help with building a Zabbix Environment

[Yarin Levy]

Hi,
I am an old Zabbix user, I have built few Zabbix environments before but I always felt that I was missing something or built it wrong.

I would like your help with organizing and structuring Zabbix in my environment.
I am about to set up a Zabbix server to monitor our Servers, Networks, Services and applications.
The Zabbix will be for: Wide overview for CTO, CIO, IT Admin (Servers, IoT Service), Network Admin, Development team (Service and Application), DBA team (SQL), Data team.

Our environment is split into:
1) Main Office which contains only Networks devices and Endpoints + IP Phones.
2) Server Hosting: Physical servers that host our Virtual environment ( around 200 VMs), Storage and so..

Please help me with drawing and preparing the best practice architecture that would fit my environment so I can build it correctly.

Thanks
Yarin.

[LenR]

Not a drawing but 1) Zabbix server, DB and web server combined in your hosting environment. 2) A proxy for devices in #1, 3) a proxy for servers in Forum 4) Agents on all servers, 5) Templates using mostly Zabbix Agent (Active) Items for servers.

At your size, it might be possible to combine the proxies, but if you use VM's, start small and grow as necessary. Tune mysql with buffers, log sizes, huge pages to avoid IO. Use partition maintenance to avoid housekeeping on trends & history.

[Yarin Levy]

Hey, Can you please explain more about "Tune mysql with buffers, log sizes, huge pages to avoid IO. Use partition maintenance to avoid housekeeping on trends & history." please?

[LenR]

Somewhat, Zabbix uses innodb tables. There are some scripts that you can run that look at the mysql environment for tuning suggestions. phpmyadmin also has an advisor panel. Adding innodb buffers keep data in memory to avoid reads. Those buffers and adequately sized redo logs let mysql defer writes. Data "committed' is written to the log, but not necessarily to the database. If it can wait until the buffer is full (from inserts) it can be written only once. If you use many pages of buffers, hugepages are more efficient ram usage.

We allocated half of the ram on our Zabbix server to hugepages for innodb buffers. I've retired, so can't verify, but I think we had 32G on the server, 16G to innodb buffers. The last change I made was increase the size of the redo logs and that alone reduced 50% of the writes to the mysql db disk. The default size is too small, but too large makes mysql restart slow.

If you have a mysql DBA, ask them for advice. It's a process of changing things, see if it helps or hurts. Every DBA has a somewhat different opinion of tuning, it's an art :-)

[LenR]

Also, check old posts, like this one https://www.zabbix.com/forum/zabbix-...bix-is-running

Mysql is changing some of these parameters, always check your matching doc to verify they are still valid or what has replaced them.

[superlava]

Agree with LenR , But I would recommend to go with 2 tier architecture (Server+Web Server and DB). Because no matter how much you tune, DB would be most resource intensive and It would be easy upgrade.

Have you thought about data retention period and refresh intervals?

[lbnt]

What are some good practices for data retention period and refresh intervals on small setups?