QOS Mail Server Monitoring

[Absilon]

Hi,

I am fairly new to zabbix and need to set up a quality of service monitor for our mail servers. What I want to do is have zabbix send an email via smtp (authenticated and using port 587) and then retrieve it via pop3 and report the amount of time that it took for the email to go through the loop. I then need to set up a trigger to generate an alert if the time it takes is longer then specified.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks to all in advance for your help.

[richlv]

would most likely involve a user parameter to send one and some script checking the receiving end, then using zabbix sender to push data into zabbix.

although i would advise against this. normally it is expected that an email goes through in the matter of seconds, thus to get any reasonable precision you would have to poll pop3 very often. obviously not a good idea...

that is, unless precision of, lets say, 60 seconds would not impact qos target much

[Absilon]

Thanks for your response richlv

We used this type of QOS monitoring at my last job where we used SiteScope and it worked very well. We would poll the mail server like this every 10 minutes. It would send the email and keep checking untill the email was retrieved. This was a monitor bguilt into SiteScope. If Zabbix can't handle this then I suppose I'll have to look into another way to monitor how long it takes for an email to go therough the loop.

[richlv]

oh, ok - 10 minutes would be perfectly fine then. a script that would grab pop3 messages could send a value to zabbix using zabbix_sender when the message arrives, and then you could use nodata() trigger against that item

[danrog]

There are a bunch of perl scripts out there that can do this. Just do a google search and I'm sure you'll find one with all the features you need (check_email_loop is a good one to look for). Then you could either modify the source to directly integrate it with Zabbix or wrap that in another script to get the output you want (personally I'd modify the source).

You'll find one of Zabbix's main strengths is it's ability to run any program/script you can find and easily send the output directly to the Zabbix server (via an agent parameter or using zabbix_sender). The base monitors available are great for system/service/network performance monitoring but once you start talking about full end to end (non-web based) synthetic tests, you'll have to search elsewhere for scripts to integrate it into Zabbix. I know there are a lot of people out there that use another monitoring tools' "checks" for things not native to Zabbix.