Distributed monitoring for time zone support?

[clarkritchie]

Our Zabbix proxy is in another time zone. As there does not seem to be a facility to handle time zone differences, it seems that if we want local users to see events in their local time zone, we would need to switch to distributed monitoring and put Zabbix servers in each time zone.

I think that distributed monitoring is hierarchical in nature. The documentation for distributed monitoring says that, "Zabbix automatically converts time stamps to local timezone when transferring time related data across nodes." That makes me think that...

Our current approach:

• Zabbix Server & Web UI in GMT-8
• Zabbix Proxy in GMT+2
• All users see events in the server's time zone, GMT-8

Alternate approach:

• Zabbix Server 1 & Web UI in GMT-8 - setup as the Central Node
• Zabbix Server 2 & Web UI in GMT+2 - setup as the Child Node
• Users in GMT-8 will access Zabbix Server 1 and see all events (events from Zabbix Server 1 and Zabbix Server 2) displayed in GMT-8
• Users in GMT+2 will access Zabbix Server 2 and only see events from Zabbix Server 2, but displayed in GMT+2

Did I get that right?

[emmanux]

You don't need to go distributed (Central/childs).
It's true that Zabbix doesn't support multiple timezones out-of-the-box, but you can do it by creating some symlinks and adding some configuration to your /etc/zabbix/apache.conf

Example

Symlinks:

/usr/share/zabbix-co -> /usr/share/zabbix
/usr/share/zabbix-ar -> /usr/share/zabbix

Modifications to /etc/zabbix/apache.conf:

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
    Alias /co /usr/share/zabbix-co
</IfModule>

<Directory "/usr/share/zabbix-co">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

    php_value max_execution_time 300
    php_value memory_limit 128M
    php_value post_max_size 16M
    php_value upload_max_filesize 2M
    php_value max_input_time 300
    php_value date.timezone America/Bogota
</Directory>

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
    Alias /ar /usr/share/zabbix-ar
</IfModule>

<Directory "/usr/share/zabbix-ar">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

    php_value max_execution_time 300
    php_value memory_limit 128M
    php_value post_max_size 16M
    php_value upload_max_filesize 2M
    php_value max_input_time 300
    php_value date.timezone America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires
</Directory>

Doing so, you got three different urls:
http://yourzabbix.server/ar (Argentina timezone)
http://yourzabbix.server/co (Colombia timezone)
http://yourzabbix.server/zabbix (default)

Each showing the same events and graphs, but according to the correct timezone.

[clarkritchie]

Thank you! Brilliant.