How can I learn about zabbix features ?

[marozsas]

Hi folks,

This is my first post in this forum. I'm glad to be here.

I am a system admin and I am justing learning about Zabbix.
I had previous experience with Nagios and I am evaluating Zabbix and so far, so good.

I just learned in this forum about icmppingsec, a simple check.
This is not covered in the on-line documentation.
Where can I find information about the others keys for simple check ? And for other types (zabbix agent, SNMP, etc) ?

I was unable to create maps and graphs too, so any help in this area will be welcome.

I am already have a zabbix server up and running and 3 monitored linux machines, with the template host.Unix.


thanks,

[marius]

I'm on the same boat as you. Documentation is seriously lacking probably due to the fact that 1.1 is still in beta. I'm trying to scour the net and this forum for information, and here's what I found so far that should help you:

http://www.zabbix.com/doku/doku.php?id=wiki:items
http://www.zabbix.com/doku/doku.php?id=wiki:triggers
http://www.zabbix.com/doku/doku.php?id=contrib:index

I'm still trying to figure out what each options mean when I create a group or a template, along with a whole bunch of other things.

[elkor]

Alexei has been silently updating the official documentation as well

http://www.zabbix.com/manual/v1.1/

check back there often

[marius]

Anybody know where can I find some info on Groups and Templates? I went through the 1.0 manual, but I'm hoping I can find some more info...

[grabber]

Anybody know where can I find some info on Groups and Templates? I went through the 1.0 manual, but I'm hoping I can find some more info...

here's how I use groups and templates....don't know if it is correct but it works for me.

I first design a template heirarchy which starts with Generic Items for all servers at the top and works down to more specific Items based on server type..i.e. Web server or DB server. I then link the templates in a chain from the bottom teir templates...
i.e. webserver.template --linked to-->generic.template.

I then create a group for each template, I know it sounds like a lot of work but it is actually quite functional, and go through the default templates and, using the add Item to group function, add the specific Items I want to the various Templates I have created via the groups (i.e. status.uptime would be in generic.template but net.tcp.service[http] would be webserver.template) , this would be easier if you could add Item to host or template directly, if you can I have misssed it!!.

Lastly I apply the now very specific function template (webserver.template) to the Hosts I want.

This way I keep control of a series of small templates with little or no duplication between them. The only caveat I have is that triggers do not seem to be copied over in the same way as Items do in the initial setup of the templates. This would be a nice addition to Zabbix.