Zabbix howto

[cristian]

Hello
I installed Zabbix for the first time on a machine running Fedora Core 2. I had some small problems following the manual (a typo on page 21; missing space between “./configure” and “--with-mysql -with-net-snmp”). Now everything seems to be working, I got the main page.
I want to test my installation doing something very simple: define a host (a router from another location), monitor its availability using ping packets, and display a graph with the round trip times. Sounds simple.
I am looking at the Zabbix manual and I cannot figure how to do it. The manual contains details about the internal workings of Zabbix, but it is missing a howto section.
Does anybody have a step-by-step procedure? Something that explains how to define one target in the hosts, items, triggers, network maps, graphs, and screens pages.
Many thanks,
Cristian

[eWebtricity]

Actually if you read the manual/user guide and follow it section by section you can get the hang of it.

The basics are first define a host in the HOST section, if you don't choose to monitor it by IP address make sure you can resolve the hostname from your Zabbix server. This was frequently a problem for us. Don't forget to choose a template type to let Zabbix know what kind of device and what type of monitoring you are doing ie: snmp, zabbix agent, simple, etc ...

Then create graphs of the parameters being monitored that your interested in. It may collect twenty to thirty parameters but your really only interested in five or ten. I would turn the other parameters off in the ITEMS section.

Once you build graphs then you can build SCREENS which is just a way to aggregrate all the graphs you want into one organized collection.

We found that the key to success was making sure you could do all the things you wanted by hand from the zabbix server. ie: snmpwalk, snmpget, etc .... We've been running v1.0 now for about 6 months and it's been pretty rock solid, the problems always end up between the chair and the keyboard.

[cristian]

Thank you

Thank you,
Cristian