ZABBIX impressions

[mbm]

Hi ZABBIX authors,

This is probably going to sound a little disappointed, and, to be honest, I am disappointed in ZABBIX. Hopefully, you can fix all of the misfeatures I'm about to list, because I have to admit to being a bit shocked by them.

• First impressions
  • Graphing - why are the feint lines at random time points? There's absolutely no need, and when you're trying to correlate what's actually going on, and what time it happened, trying to split between 14:23 and 14:52 to work out that something happened at 14:35 or so - that you can correlate in logging is really very painful. Feint lines should be at sensible round-number intervals - 5 mins, 10 mins, 30 mins, 1hr - for example depending on the graph scale
  • Graphing - How can I nail the baseline of the y-axis to 0? I don't want to see negative numbers for a delta of an incrementing counter, and I don't want to suddenly find that because I haven't got anything nailing the axis I get just the small deltas, rather than an overall picture.
  • Configuration - Why can I not export, edit, and import a configuration? (If I can't edit it directly with an editor). Point and click may be useful for some things, but for repetitive situations, creating, for example, lots of items in a template ends up being very painful.
• ZABBIX Sender
  I have a load of custom data that I want to graph and monitor on. You don't have direct checks in the ZABBIX agent for this, and there's quite a lot of data, so I don't want to do it as individual external checks (I'd like external checks which can submit multiple keys and values at once, ideally).
  • The usage and --help output do not reflect any kind of reality and even disagree explicitly with comments in the code (which reflect what the code actually says). Where's your QA department? That was pretty shocking. I'd generally rather read documentation than source to find out what I'm actually supposed to be giving something like this.
  • If you're using ZABBIX sender because writing out lots of values at once is useful, then wanting to input values with a pipe is generally considered sane: -i - results in [-] [No such file or directory]. Thankfully this is pretty easy to patch.
  • You need to use -v -v to see that certain of the commandline options are not being correctly handled - things that cause effective dies are actually logged as warnings, rather than fatal.
  • The ZABBIX sender submits all the keys and values as one bit of JSON - GOOD. The ZABBIX server replies with <n> processed, <m> failed, but doesn't tell you which are which - BAD - good luck in finding them. The server.log is little help in this case.
  • The C is ummmm.....
• Item configuration
  • This is completely unintuitive, as far as I can tell. I have a set of uint_64 counters that I want to graph as rates. I tell ZABBIX item config that they're Numeric Integer (64-bit) - they are. I ask it to give me delta per second (that's what I want, after all), and it seems (as far as I can tell) to be storing the rate per second as a uint_64 rather than a double - er what!?
  • The data sources and their documentation are a little hard to follow - it took me a while to realise I wasn't going to be able to write my numeric checks as external checks.
  • As above, configuring items is a massive pain - save and clone look the same after you've clicked through the same screen 15 times, and so you end up having to go back and reinsert the things that you've helpfully changed the key and description of - no warnings there...

The patch for -i - in ZABBIX sender is about an extra four lines and one minor change, please feel free to give me a shout if you'd like it.

All of the above things are misfeatures I'd expect in a pre-1.0 release, not an "Enterprise Class" "Production" release.

Don't get me wrong, the ideas of integrated monitoring, graphing and alerting on trend behaviour are totally awesome, and I hope you get there, but I don't think you can claim you're there yet.

Cheers

MBM (Systems Engineer)

[Aly]

Hi there,
First of all thank you for your posting, I love reading critics, I do, it helps to look on things from different view.

Graphs:
1. Random time points, we already started to develop this improvement, so stay tuned
2. Y-Baseline to zero, actually you can. Configuration->graphs->create new->Y-axis type->Calculated[Min=0]. In pre 1.7.x you can set Y-min, Y-max values or even link those values to items.

Configuration:
You can export or import through Configuration->Export/Import. It's a little bit limited but should do for most cases. You can create xml import by any tool and than import it into zabbix.

Unintuitive item configuration, yes, it became massive and complicated, as new features been added to it. I agree that interface needs to be some how simplified, but without lose of any functionality

Cheers

[mbm]

Hi Aly,

Thanks for getting back to me. I actually discovered the former - my colleague obviously didn't when he was setting up the system. The export is, to say the least, painful, and there's no schema definition within the XML, so it's real hand-edit stuff :-(

For me, getting the feint lines correct on the graphing is actually a surprisingly big deal, with a pretty close second for sorting out the ZABBIX sender (or an equivalent way of running and scheduling checks of multiple values at once). (there is the side of me that doesn't really want to use ZABBIX sender in cron, but would rather use ZABBIX's own scheduling).

Cheers

MBM