Zabbix Newbie

[itsnota2ma]

Zabbix newbie here. After 5 years with Spiceworks (and the abrupt end) I have moved on. I have reviewed and tried lots of products. I am starting to settle on Zabbix because I am really starting to like it. I have a few general questions and then a few specific questions.

1. I downloaded the Appliance because that was the easy option. Will I regret staying on the appliance? I have a small environment (150 devices). Can I migrate to my own installation later on and move the DB??

2. I have been reading and watching the videos. Very helpful, but I could not find a good "best practices", like setup all my templates first, or use X template for Windows Servers, etc. OR is this much more trial and error?

3. I LOVE the dashboards!! A visual queue is soooo much better than sifting through data! With that said, how is everyone displaying disk usage?? The pie chart is okay.....but I think there is a better way to display that - just haven't discovered it yet. Suggestions welcome.

4. I have already setup agents and SNMP monitoring. Has anyone deployed agents to all of their machines? Do you notice any performance hit, issues, etc. Has anyone gone completely SNMP?? If so why??

I apologize for the bombardment of questions, but I have a lot to learn about Zabbix.

[tim.mooney]

1. I've not used the appliance, and I've never looked under the hood to see what database its using. Assuming you can SQL dump from whatever database the appliance is using and successfully SQL import the dump into your preferred database, then yes, it should be possible to switch from the appliance to your own install.

2. I'm not aware of any "best practices" either. I think part of the reason for its absence is that how different organizations do monitoring varies widely, so it's at least a little difficult to provide cut-and-dried rules for deploying Zabbix. Still, there are plenty of things that veterans with Zabbix have learned that could be codified and could help newcomers avoid "beginner mistakes".

That's actually part of the reason why I've been spending so much time on the forums lately. We've been using Zabbix at my site for several years now, so I do know a lot about it. The issue for me is that the product has changed a lot since we initially deployed it (we started at 2.0.2 or 2.0.3), so there are features that we could be using (tags, recovery expressions, probably lots of other stuff) that we're not. Even though there are parts of Zabbix I would consider myself an "expert" on, I've been looking for guidance and best practices from other experts here on how they've updated their environment to use tags, or whatever.

3. I don't have any suggestions for this, but pie charts are pretty standard for graphically representing "this portion of the whole".

4. We use agents on all our Windows and Linux boxes. The agent seems pretty efficient, and we've never noticed much of a performance hit. If you code your own custom items via UserParameters, those could potentially be inefficient, but that's up to you to make sure your custom code performs well.

We also use SNMP for our network gear and other devices where an agent isn't an option, but we prefer the agent for traditional hosts.