Zabbix Distributed Monitoring Suggestions

[vasiliy]

Guys, DM is working properly... Setting up hosts, hostgroups, users, usergroups...

What I would love to hear are your suggestions... How should the logic follow?

Should I define usergroups, users, everywhere? on master, child nodes? In that case, which server will do the notifications?

Should I look at this setup as really "independent zabbix servers" and just set them up identically?

THANKS

[Alexei]

GHow should the logic follow?

ZABBIX is very flexible and it supports numerous scenarios for distributed monitoring setup.

I think that all depends on your business requirements, size and number of locations, availability of links, centralized or local management of nodes, etc, etc. There is no single answer!

[pdwalker]

*bump*

So, what do people suggest regarding setting up a Distributed Monitoring setup vs a Proxy setup?

pros? cons?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[walterheck]

My personal experience has taught me to stay away from DM, and use proxies instead. It might seem that DM is more powerful, but in reality I found it making things a lot more complicated. Another drawback is how it's being done internally: all your primary keys in your db go from a few digits to really large which created mayhem in the 1.8.1 setup we used it in. It's also a one-way street: you can go from non-DM to DM, but not back.

Proxies are already a lot better, but have the downside of needing a database of their own. It can do with SQLite for smaller setups, but really needs MySQL to function properly. That adds extra overhead to yoru setup.

My recommendation: see if you _really_ need DM/Proxies for your setup. Our hosted zabbix service Tribily currently uses active-only zabbix agents without any proxies or DM, but our biggest clients right now have no more then 25 servers. We just let each of their clients connect directly to us, which simplifies setup and removes a lot of possible points of failure.

So, to sum it all up, this is the order of what I would choose, 1 being most recommended:
1. Active agents
2. Proxy
3. DM

I have left SNMP/Passive agents out of this. SNMP is not suitable for any use i've ever used zabbix for so i cannot say anything about it, and passive seems the default but for no good reason other then that passive supports agent.status and active doesn't.

[pdwalker]

walterheck,

That is exactly the kind of information I was looking for.

I've inherited a DM system, but the people who were managing it were surprised that they actually had to maintain the servers individually.

It looks like I'll be doing a complete reinstall and setting it up as a single master with multiple proxies

(the system monitors servers that are located in 5 different hosting centers)

Thanks!

[walterheck]

walterheck,
It looks like I'll be doing a complete reinstall and setting it up as a single master with multiple proxies

Good luck with that. To really get rid of those nasty primary keys, you have to redo everything, you cannot even export/import.

It cost us (well, technically a client of mine :P ) a lot of time when we decided to redo everything from scratch. I'm glad we did though, because over time we learnt a lot about zabbix and we got to properly apply that all from scratch, so the system is running well now, just 1 proxy and only active hosts.

Important details that I think was too much hidden in the release notes is that only since 1.8.3 can you have proxies be active as a whole.

Best of luck! Zabbix is great software, as long as you are experienced in using it