Dedicated Zabbix Monitoring Box

[Zebedee0026]

What would you need to install zabbix in a small hardware case that is rack mountable, and have a light OS, maybe just a serial port to configure the IP address, then do everything else via a webinterface.

This would be really cool for the Zabbix Proxy in the next version!

[nelsonab]

Your question is *quite* ambiguous. Could you please clarify what you are looking for?

If you are asking how to install Linux on a system with only a serial port and network connection, that's outside the scope of this forum. Google is thy friend... along with LOTS of patience and time... most of the writeups out there can be "challenging" to understand if you don't already have a fair bit of experience.

If you're looking for a suggestion as to what hardware to use, please give us a description of what you hope to monitor? How many items, how often etc.

From there we can give you a better answer.

[Zebedee0026]

Ok situation: - work for an IT company that has small to medium clients that runs mainly Window OS’s to look after.

these are my requirements:- a small box that, has a hard drive or flashcard with a OS that’s small, with only the components that needed to run Zabbix in full mode (Zabbix Server, Mysql, SMNP, etc) or just run the new proxy mode.

Also be able to change the OS settings via a web interface EG Webmin

Would love to have some links to building Linux on a with just serial and networks ports, and to hardware that would fit the bill.

I love this product with logging and monitoring and it's open source, beats the hell out of Nagios!

[Tenzer]

My biggest concern here is if you will get the required performance out of an embedded box like the one you are describing, in order to monitor a sufficient amount of hosts with a decent interval.

However, a Sun SPARC server is basically also a box with network interfaces and a serial port, so that would also fit into your description of the box, and it certainly has enough power

[nelsonab]

Ok situation: - work for an IT company that has small to medium clients that runs mainly Window OS’s to look after.

these are my requirements:- a small box that, has a hard drive or flashcard with a OS that’s small, with only the components that needed to run Zabbix in full mode (Zabbix Server, Mysql, SMNP, etc) or just run the new proxy mode.

Also be able to change the OS settings via a web interface EG Webmin

Would love to have some links to building Linux on a with just serial and networks ports, and to hardware that would fit the bill.

I love this product with logging and monitoring and it's open source, beats the hell out of Nagios!

Most of what you are asking for is outside the scope of this forum.

If I were in your spot I'd look for an old whitebox system and put some decent size IDE drives in it and run them RAID 1 using software RAID. As for configuring the thing to be setup over a serial or network link, you'll need to search the interwebs. OpenSuSE in my experience has been very good at remote installation. Dig around, and expect to be somewhat frustrated. Remote installs on a headless (no keyboard/video/mouse) system is a somewhat advanced topic.

[Alexei]

I am pretty sure performance of the embedded hardware will not be enough for a ZABBIX server monitoring many devices. However it may be OK for a proxy.

[teferi]

these are my requirements:- a small box that, has a hard drive or flashcard with a OS that’s small, with only the components that needed to run Zabbix in full mode (Zabbix Server, Mysql, SMNP, etc) or just run the new proxy mode.

Also be able to change the OS settings via a web interface EG Webmin

Would love to have some links to building Linux on a with just serial and networks ports, and to hardware that would fit the bill.

Check distrowatch for a distro that suit's you.
And specify at least approximately how many items and how often you want to monitor - otherwise it's impossible to give you any advice on what hardware you should use.

[Zebedee0026]

Clients

lets say the avarge client has 2 servers, 50 PC's, 5 Printers, 1 UPS.

[nelsonab]

lets say the avarge client has 2 servers, 50 PC's, 5 Printers, 1 UPS.

You can monitor that on anything from an old Pentium 3 to a Quad Core 3GHz processor. It comes down to how often you want to monitor your data. The more often you want data the more IO intensive things are going to be.

Now, thinking on my "average" setup where I'm only interested in data once every two to five minutes you can probably get away with an old P4 with ATA 100 drives and software RAID 1. I would also throw as much RAM as I can at it for MySQL. The RAM won't do jack to improve your IO for data writing, but it will help make the web frontend a lot snappier. If you can do things like SCSI RAID put your money there. Disk IO performance is the biggest bottleneck to Zabbix performance.

It all comes down to one major metric. Items per second. The lower this number the lower your hardware needs.