Welcome me...

[nibb]

Hi im new to Zabbix and I hope i become on more family member.

Let me start my first post with a very long one...

How I came to Zabbix is interesting. I know almost every monitoring solution outhere, I have tested from Nagios, to Hyperic, from Big Brother to Zenoss, Groundwork, etc. I never gave Zabbix a shot because it seemed it had not all the functions and features from things like Hyperic for example. But thats why i never actually tested it. Now here is my story.

I needed a monitoring solution which could comply with this features:
1) It should have low resources agent, that means agents installed on servers should eat as low RAM and CPU as possible.
2) The server should also if possible not be a resource eater, not so important as the agents, but nice to have.
3) It should support virtualization for XenServer
4) It should have all the features expected from a professional solution, like action triggering on serves, easy to use, good with features, good price. Escalations, etc.

Its was ratter impossible to find one of this. Of the softwares somene where incredible expensive, I saw some that costed thousands, basically like 7$ per resource monitored, they must be crazy to open source like Nagios, which is incredible but little to complicated if you need things fast.

If I took XenServer from Citrix I basically was left with 3 solutions only.
Hyperic, BixData and Zenoss.

Now, BixData was the best for my scenario. The agents installed and running used ridiculous resources, and it has tons of nice features. It comes with a tag price but i was almost willing to pay it except for this:
The software seems death, the websites has copyright from 2006, the last updated was 2 years ago, their forum last post was 8 months ago. I would not put my IT department in a software that has bugs, i cannot get support and that will not be developed further. That was my impression sadly since i liked it.

Then there was Hyperic. They claimed with BIG letters that they could monitor Xenserver, and they where the first one and only solution. Thats is a lie actually since i had used BixData 7 months before they ever launched their XenServer plugin. The problem with Hyperic is that even when it has nice functions its horrible in performance. The server alone runs with 1.2 GB ram minimum with not even monitoring 1 resource, I have tested all solutions in a VPS account i created with limited resources, and Hyperic was the worst one, it runned very bad, it needs a very big monster servers to run. I could live with that, but not with their agents. They say their agents consume 80 MB ram to 120 MB ram each but on their website they say minimum required 256 MB. Thats crazy really, each monitoring agent consumes 100 MB ram on real scenario, way to much for what i needed. I discarded completely Hyperic, even when it seemed the most robust one and used by big companies. It also had the price tag with the enterprise edition, the pricing model was per server and with recurring fees, something i dont like, not to mention you need the enterprise edition if you need all functions.

Zenoss, i did not tested it actually but people said it also requires to much resources because its python, their prices seem also to expensive, they charge per resource monitored !!!

I had to mention that i completely discarded to find a solution that could be customizable or have multi language. Hyperic and others seems so hardcoded you cannot change anything.

So I gave Zabbix a shot. Installing was ratter complicated in CentOS. It took me like 10 shots. Sometimes the agent was not working and some the server. Finally I made my own howto to CentOS and i think its working, I have to start things manually since the auto start or from command line dont work, but at least it works for testing. I have to say that Zabbix seems to be more complicated in install then Hyperic or others. Specially because the info i found for CentOS is ratter old. Also the documentation must be somehow updated. I could not log in just because it says you have to leave blank pass, so i had to find out the new version has as password "zabbix"

Well I can say that im impressed with Zabbix after some hours with it. Its customizable and with several languages!!! That was a surprise, one of my objectives was with time to have it running in 2 languages and to be able to fully customize the templates and look. After months i was happy if I just could find something that worked.

Now Zabbix has this right in your face. I never even would had expect that, and i had read the Zabbix features several times. I suppose its always better if you try a solution. Nice , templates, languages etc. I also like the functions it has. Oh yes, it doest support XenServer but I think there is a great community and since the code is open and from XenServer API is as well, im sure I will find some way around to it.

So how much ram does the agent require in a real world scenario? Im not using it on production yet but it seems very good.

[nelsonab]

Welcome! I think you'll find it to be a very good program overall. At first some of the flexability can seem frustrating, however I have come to see this as it's true strength. Overall as you learn the program I think you will be very pleased.

So how much ram does the agent require in a real world scenario? Im not using it on production yet but it seems very good.

I don't have any hard numbers in front of me, but it's dependent on the number of threads you have for the agent. The normal is 6 and the agent rarely takes more than a few KB and a few fractions of a second of CPU for most things. If you write a complex external check then all bets may be off, but that's "your" doing. ;-)

[nibb]

Thanks. I have read the whole manual.

Im slowly starting to figure things out. But im sure once I get hands on it i will be real powerful. I will also try to pay a programmer or someone to make a plugin for XenServer. I suppose in the meanwhile it will not be a problem to install the current agents in each VM just as they where normal servers.

Just one question. On my zabbix server is it normal to see multiple process for the agent and server?

I dont see 1 zabbix_agent and 1 zabbix_server process, but multiples all with the same name. I just wonder this not that i have multiple instances running of each one. Is this normal or did my installation not went so good that is starts several servers and agents at once?

[nelsonab]

You're not seeing double or tripple or however many it may be, that's normal. Early on the server/agent process will fork() however many times necessary. Each one of these "threads" performs a function such as housekeeping, polling, listening and so forth. The mix is determined by the config file as you're likely aware. What would be nice however is if each process changed it's process name to denote it's function. It looks like the code is there to do it, but it does not happen. :-(

[nibb]

You're not seeing double or tripple or however many it may be, that's normal. Early on the server/agent process will fork() however many times necessary. Each one of these "threads" performs a function such as housekeeping, polling, listening and so forth. The mix is determined by the config file as you're likely aware. What would be nice however is if each process changed it's process name to denote it's function. It looks like the code is there to do it, but it does not happen. :-(

So what you mean is that they all have the same name and that is normal? They do have all different ID process. I really thought they where duplicated things running, for the agent there are like 5 and the server like 8 (just from my head, not sure how much exactly) I also would like to identify what does each one do to be sure its running correctly.

[teferi]

So what you mean is that they all have the same name and that is normal? They do have all different ID process. I really thought they where duplicated things running, for the agent there are like 5 and the server like 8 (just from my head, not sure how much exactly) I also would like to identify what does each one do to be sure its running correctly.

Main process has a handler for sigchild, that stops execution of zabbix if smth went wrong, besides - there's log file where most significant events are depicted. like from houskeeper:
933:20081010:121633 Deleted 250 records from history and trends

[nibb]

Thanks, so Zabbix is running normally then like this. I just wanted to be sure before putting in a real life testing enviroment. Not to find out on the way my install is someone how wrong. It is actually, I doesnt start on boot and but that is just my inid files which probably are wrong. Since i installed this on CentOs there was not an easy way to do this. I can post all the commands on a howto if someone likes to check it. It requires allot of steps and config tuning i had to edit for CentOs 5.

[teferi]

Thanks, so Zabbix is running normally then like this. I just wanted to be sure before putting in a real life testing enviroment. Not to find out on the way my install is someone how wrong. It is actually, I doesnt start on boot and but that is just my inid files which probably are wrong. Since i installed this on CentOs there was not an easy way to do this. I can post all the commands on a howto if someone likes to check it. It requires allot of steps and config tuning i had to edit for CentOs 5.

If you like - you may post it somewhere on the forum or on project wiki http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/doku.php

[nibb]

If you like - you may post it somewhere on the forum or on project wiki http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/doku.php

Problem the install doesnt work as expected. My Zabbix works, agent and servers. But the init scripts and some paths are not correct. I will post it here and maybe someone can point out what was wrong in my install.

[nelsonab]

Problem the install doesnt work as expected. My Zabbix works, agent and servers. But the init scripts and some paths are not correct. I will post it here and maybe someone can point out what was wrong in my install.

As Teferi said when you're ready post your items to the Wiki.

The multiple processes can be somewhat annoying at first, but it is normal. Also if you kill one of the processes the main Zabbix process will shutdown all other processes and terminate. As for the CentOS issue, I came across the same thing. I also came across similar problems for the init scripts for SuSE, but all were pretty straightforward to fix.

As you move forward you will want to start paying attention to MySQL and it's performance. This is *THE* biggest bottleneck. Also as your number of monitored items increases you'll want to increase the number of poller/trapper processes in the server as needed. At a recent client site our Zabbix server was running about 35 processes, it was likely overkill, but some of our items were tied to custom scripts that might take a second or two to run which ties up a poller thread.

[troffasky]

I will also try to pay a programmer or someone to make a plugin for XenServer.

What about Xen do you wish to monitor? The Xen plugin for Munin might be a good place to start - it's just a Bash script, so ripe for hacking.

[nibb]

XenServer from Citrix. They use the open source Xen version but its even easier to monitor it with the Citrix version since they provide API to the whole interface. Thats why its easy to develop plugins for it like Hyperic did. Actually the first monitoring software i saw that had a plugin was BixData. Most plugins lets you get data from the Xenserver and even execute some control commands like Restart a VM. Im not a programmer, otherwise i would program it with the API. Actually if you do a search on this forum for "xenserver" only this posts comes out. Its seems there is nobody that uses Zabbix with Xen or at least that it seems. I think if there was a plugin Zabbix will attract allot of users like me. Im actually decided to pay someone if he wants to make a plugin for it.