Need some general Zabbix related questions answered - New to Zabbix

[torontob]

Hi Everyone,

I run quite a few number of Asterisk servers and some web servers. Asterisk VoIP and analogue services are very important to us. More than the webservers and other services. So, I am currently in the process of choosing an open-source monitoring software that can take care of all of my needs and yet have a good base of developers and active community with a great road-map ahead. I would like to get some honest opinions on the following points and maybe some explainations if things are dealt in a different way with this project. Any input is much appreciated:

- Support for central management (monitor multiple Asterisk servers and web servers)

- Client to be lightweight on the Asterisk server and have no need to open ports on Asterisk server but rather send out it's stat info to the Monitoring Server.

- Show a nice radar like display of all the Asterisk servers or overall Servers temperatures into few different LCDs to give the overall picture in one look.

- Of course be capable of alerting using at least e-mail alerts. Any other methodes would be bonus. Redundancy in reportin is also a bonus.

- Have an easy to use API or script based method to allow me to add Asterisk Call notification for Alerting.

- Be opensource and want to remain open-source rather than dying soon or going commercial.

- Have some Asterisk user base who have already did some work on it or partially invented the wheel. Maybe someone else who had experience with Asterisk and this project maybe able to give an input to this.


Thanks,

[nelsonab]

I run quite a few number of Asterisk servers and some web servers. Asterisk VoIP and analogue services are very important to us. More than the webservers and other services. So, I am currently in the process of choosing an open-source monitoring software that can take care of all of my needs and yet have a good base of developers and active community with a great road-map ahead. I would like to get some honest opinions on the following points and maybe some explainations if things are dealt in a different way with this project. Any input is much appreciated:

Personal opinion, but I think you will find Zabbix will either fit or come dam near close for your needs.. ;-)

- Support for central management (monitor multiple Asterisk servers and web servers)

All of the configuration information as to what is monitored is stored in the central Zabbix database. The only exception to this rule is any special "UserParameter"s which are set up to monitor specific items, think of a UserParameter as a unique script on a host. These are scripts you build once and deploy once, and only update or change when there is an underlying change or a bug in your script.

- Client to be lightweight on the Asterisk server and have no need to open ports on Asterisk server but rather send out it's stat info to the Monitoring Server.

The main client is written in C and you will find that over the long haul very little CPU time is spent within the client.

- Show a nice radar like display of all the Asterisk servers or overall Servers temperatures into few different LCDs to give the overall picture in one look.

I don't know about a "radar" like display but you can create some overview screens of your servers which can be used to show health graphs or trigger status'. If you have a NOC you could even run a few slideshows (sequence of screens) on some of your big screens.

- Of course be capable of alerting using at least e-mail alerts. Any other methodes would be bonus. Redundancy in reportin is also a bonus.

Choose your poison... SMTP (default to localhost), SMTP with auth (via external script), SMS (Via external script), Jabber (option for compiled in support), Festival with Asterisk (search forum for pointers on external script).

- Have an easy to use API or script based method to allow me to add Asterisk Call notification for Alerting.

The API is new, but it is starting to settle in, and there are folks such as myself who are actively maintaining wrapper libraries.

- Be opensource and want to remain open-source rather than dying soon or going commercial.

Open Source since day 1, everything is GPL.

- Have some Asterisk user base who have already did some work on it or partially invented the wheel. Maybe someone else who had experience with Asterisk and this project maybe able to give an input to this.

you'll need to speak up in the forums. There are a few of us who have worked with Asterisk and Zabbix. As you may guess we cannot tell you how to do something, but someone may be able to give you some ideas on how to implement what you want.

Lastly, one thing to remember about Zabbix as compared to something like Nagios. Zabbix out of the box will not tell you if something is working on not, it will however tell you how well something is working or not. From that you can then derive a trigger to determine what is and is not working. Nagios on the other hand cannot tell you how well something is working or not, to do that you need something like MRTG or Cactai and well that's just a royal pain in the ass when compared to Zabbix. :-)

[torontob]

Thanks for the detailed response. That is great help coming from someone who has used the system in scenarios like I do.

One last question about Zabbix, is there any need to open two-way connection to clients? or I mean open ports on the clients to get status info?

I guess that would be necessarily regards for control but how about just status info.

Thanks

[nelsonab]

Thanks for the detailed response. That is great help coming from someone who has used the system in scenarios like I do.

No prob, politely asked good questions go a long way. :-)

One last question about Zabbix, is there any need to open two-way connection to clients? or I mean open ports on the clients to get status info?

I realize I forgot to answer this question. Zabbix has two basic modes of communication, active and passive. Passive is the default where the server connects to the client every time an item is to be checked. Active is where the agent connects to the server, get's a list of items to monitor and then periodically sends the items back to the server. Active has a lower overhead on the Zabbix server. The downside of Active if you will is it can take longer for monitoring changes to propgate to the clients and if there is an error sometimes you may not know without digging into things, but this is mostly an edge case.

Right now all communication is in the clear, however there is talk of adding GSSAPI or some other similar library to Zabbix to allow for strong authentication and encryption. If you have expertiese in this area or are interested in helping look for the thread and hop in.

The biggest thing you will want to consider is how to monitor the health of you Asterisk boxes. Zabbix can do the monitoring just fine but it will only be as good as what you decide to monitor. At one point I was looking at interfacing Zabbix with the AGI, but I didn't manage to get far with it, I was hoping to look at the jitter of the IAX and SIP links in the hopes of tracking down a NASTY call drop problem. I can tell you more if you want offline.

[torontob]

Thanks again for the information.

Indeed I am looking to do some phpAGI to do the monitoring but I need to deploy Zabbix at least with one client and get to know it better before I can comment further. Time to start reading some of the documentations...

Regards,