Zabbix Screens

[delija91p]

Hey everyone, hows it going?! Now that I have most of my servers in zabbix and in the correct groups, I want to create some cool screens where I can view an overview of information. The main thing I want to do and I have no idea if its possible is to have all the servers in one group show their Memory usage on one graph, or I would like to have all the servers in one group showing their memory usage on one screen but multiple graphs... The thing is I have a lot of servers so I need a way to do this automatically as a server is added to the group for the screen to add the correct graph from that server... Can anyone please help out with this? I know its complicated and might be tough, but that would make Zabbix the perfect tool for all the servers I monitor.

Thank You all so much in advance!

[tchjts1]

I think I have a better solution for you. But before I suggest that, let me explain why.

If you are motioning 5 or 6 servers only, that would be fine to put them all on one graph in a screen. Or even to put 5 or 6 single graphs into a screen. But when you start getting up into 50, 250, 1,000, 3,000 Windows servers, that is not going to be feasible.

Enter Dynamic screens. I build a Dynamic screen for each of my OS's, Windows, Linux and Solaris. So try this out and see if you like it:

In your Template OS Windows, create a graph at the template level and name it Memory Usage, or whatever you want. I put two items in mine, Total memory and Free memory and I make them gradient fill. When you do that, that graph is now available for all servers that have that template assigned to them.

Do the same thing for CPU usage. Using the same host to select the graph from as you did the Memory Usage graph. Create a graph and put CPU Idle time and CPU total time on a graph. Again, I like gradient fill.

Now go to Screens and create a new screen. For Windows, I make the screen 2 columns by about 20 rows. And these I like to name "Dynamic Windows" (Or Dynamic Linux, etc)

In the top left column, insert your CPU graph from a reliable host. Doesn't matter which one, but this will be your default host. Make sure you select "Graph" from the dropdown. For CPU I like to make it span 2 columns with an 800 x 125 setting. Now the important part is to make sure you put a checkmark in the "Dynamic Item" box. After you save that, in the next available row, do the same thing for the Memory Usage graph you created. Again, this is one I like to make span 2 columns with the same settings as as for the CPU graph. Checkmark the Dynamic Item box.

Now go to Monitoring --> Screens and select your newly created "Dynamic Windows" screen. after that comes up, you will see the default server displaying the graphs you laid out. At the top right, you will see 3 dropdown boxes: Screen, Group and Host. Leave the screen selection as is and select the group that your Windows servers are in. Next from the Host dropdown, select whatever host you want to look at. You will now see the data on the graphs is populated with that host's data.

For the single cell graphs I like to put the lesser priority graphs in place, such as Number of Processes, Number of threads, etc. For these, I select "Simple Graph" and make the setting 400 x 125 and only have them occupy 1 column and I put them side by side as I go down through the rows putting a different graph in each cell (All from the same host!). Again - the important thing is putting a checkmark in the "Dynamic Item" box.

So this way, now you have only created one screen for all of your Windows servers to where you only have to change the "Host" at the top right dropdown.

The limitation to this is that you will want to use only items that are common across your Windows servers. If you have a unique item, obviously it will not populate data from hosts where that item does not exist.

Play around with Dynamic item screens. I think you will like it once you get the hang of it. I am running 2.0.9 and I think there was talk about improving the way screens work. Whether they have implemented something better than what I have described above, I think this is the way to go.

[delija91p]

This is Perfect

Thank you so so much! This is better than anything I thought of, and it is much nicer to look at and click on various hosts instead of a bunch of them all on one screen! This was exactly what I was looking for, so thank you!!

[tchjts1]

I'm glad that is what you were looking for. if you send me a private message here with your regular e-mail address, I will send you a PDF of my screen layout to maybe give you some ideas of ways to group these graphs.

I like to logically group them first by OS metrics (CPU, memory, swap, etc) then by disk stats, then by disk space. With some odds and ends thrown in, like clock, system information and the version of Zabbix agent that is on each server.