Zabbix Proxy load balancing

[mpotter-xiss]

I am curious as to whether or not a setup like would work.

• A farm of zabbix proxy servers - can be added to as needed.
• Use a load balancing device (switch based or appliance based) to send traffic to the zabbix proxy farm based on either load or least connections.
• Have the farm send all of the data to the Zabbix master server.

We will be monitoring quite a few services on ~5000 hosts and are working on the scaling at present. Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

[Alexei]

The load balancing schema must be supported internally by Zabbix in order to work nicely. Otherwise we may get all sorts of problems related to duplicate and unordered data simultaneously sent from two or more proxies.

[mpotter-xiss]

The load balancing schema must be supported internally by Zabbix in order to work nicely. Otherwise we may get all sorts of problems related to duplicate and unordered data simultaneously sent from two or more proxies.

Are any load balancing schema supported internally at this time?

Would a pyramid type of layout work better for scaling?

How would be the best way to handle the data coming from ~5000 hosts without overloading the Zabbix server?

We are using MySQL cluster on the backend, have the Zabbix server on powerful hardware and setup with Linux HA to provide failover. We are in pre-production with ~110 hosts, and admittedly some excessive checks, but the web interface (a large selling point) is already very slow. The Dashboard view is 17-26 seconds for display and the Overview view is upwards 45 seconds. This is concerning as it seems the web interface would be unusable at ~500 hosts if the slowness grows in a linear fashion and much less if it grows exponentially. The load on the server doesn't increase in a noticeable manner during reloading the pages mentioned above and it's not swapping at all so I know the proc and ram can handle much more than we have thrown at it. I suspect it may be the MySQL backend.

I am working on tuning the templates now but it is my feeling Zabbix should handle ~110 servers with relative ease and without the web interface being slow. I am also working on doing MySQL performance tuning and will see where that leads.

[Alexei]

Are any load balancing schema supported internally at this time?

Would a pyramid type of layout work better for scaling?

How would be the best way to handle the data coming from ~5000 hosts without overloading the Zabbix server?

Just a couple of advices:

1. Disable all pollers on ZABBIX Server side
2, Spread the load evenly between all proxies
3. Do not run housekeeper
4. Use database partitions (depends on your DB engine)
5. Enable Zabbix database cache
6. Use hardware with in-memory disk write cache
7. BTW Something is very wrong with your setup if the GUI is so slow
8. Report any problems and performance issues to Zabbix Team. Well, a support agreement is required for guaranteed assistance.

[tdomhan]

1. Disable all pollers on ZABBIX Server side

are those pollers really the performance killers?
doesn't the database use the most performance?

Do not run housekeeper

do you recommend no housekeeping at all?

[tdomhan]

another thing:
when zabbix is polling, it will look in the items table for the hosts that need to be polled.
if you use proxies, will the proxy use the database of the zabbix server or will it have it's own DB that with a items table?