Traffic Lights

[Yello]

Hi All,
I'm very new to zabbix so please bear with me if I am asking apparently obvious questions...

I have zabbix set up on a test system and we're evaluating its potential to replace an in-house monitoring platform we have used for some time. Our monitoring is primarily web oriented though that could shift a little in the future. But for now I have set up a graph to monitor the response time of one of our "KPI" urls. We have a number of these...

That's fine but I also want to be configure a way of seeing at a glance groups of these tests in a red,yellow, gren format in order to get a dashboard view of the responsiveness of our various web server groupings.

Can someone explain to me how zabbix should be configured to enabled that kind of traffic light style approach, or something similar?

Regards,
David

[qix]

Hello David,

What you could do, is scrape the contents of your KPI pages with scripts (wget/curl) so you can use the resulting values to feed items.
You can then define triggers with various severities based on the item value (green=information, yellow=warning, red=high).

These triggers can then be shown in the dashboard, on a screen or the triggers screen.

Not exactly a traffic light, but close

Good luck!

[nelsonab]

To take you a little more literally....

http://www.delcomproducts.com/products.asp

You could use one of these to create a real traffic light of sorts. Use with Zabcon (shameless plug) to determine the current status of triggers, and then turn on the appropriate colored light according to your specifications.

[qix]

@nelsonab: LOL, that is awesome

@Yello, I liked the idea of the traffic lights though, I created a feature request for it. If you can get a lot of people to vote on it, it might acctually get implemented by the devs

Unfortunately the support site (https://support.zabbix.com) seems to be down atm. so I can't give you a direct link to the ticket.

The ticketnumber is ZBXNEXT-742, so feel free to search that on the support site when it is up again.

[Yello]

Hello David,

What you could do, is scrape the contents of your KPI pages with scripts (wget/curl) so you can use the resulting values to feed items.
You can then define triggers with various severities based on the item value (green=information, yellow=warning, red=high).

These triggers can then be shown in the dashboard, on a screen or the triggers screen.

Not exactly a traffic light, but close

Good luck!

I think I should clarify. When I say "KPI pages" i mean selected pages for which the response times of which are seen as bellweathers for the responsiveness of either that content type or for that part of the web infrastructure.

The current KPI levels are coded into the tool that we currently use. So what I want to do is to be able to look at the response time of the web query (or group of related queries, which may or may not be on the same host) and then to see the status of these in a dashboard format.

Fromt the responses so far I suspect that triggers are part of the answer to this. But correct me if I'm wrong, but don't triggers require the use of zabbix agents? There doesn't seem to be a way to generate triggers from web monitoring and to then display status information in a dashboard format. That is the crux of my question.

Regards,
David

[Yello]

Fromt the responses so far I suspect that triggers are part of the answer to this. But correct me if I'm wrong, but don't triggers require the use of zabbix agents?

I now see that triggers can be set up against a web scenario. That gives me a line of enquiry to be getting on with...

Regards,
David

[qix]

Hi David,

The webscenarios automatically create items that get fed with the values (like http status code or response time).
These items can be used to create triggers just like any other items.

You can feed items with values from various sources, be it agents, snmp, ipmi or zabbix trapper. Webscenarios are different in that they just automatically create the associated items for you.

If you like, you can use those items to trigger and even use actions.