Task Scheduling

[anrstone]

Does any one know of a system that uses the Zabbix agents through a separate interface (or extended i/f) to provide enterprise task scheduling. As the agents are already on servers this seems like a good model for this kind of thing especially as the event management and remote running is already their?

If not does anyone fancy working on that kind of thing?

Thanks

[danrog]

I was actually already thinking of doing something like this using the API (but maybe not to the level you are thinking of) . As I was thinking about how this would play out, I came up with some things that will be hard to overcome (at least for us) for various reasons.

For Windows: Some of our tasks need to be run as a Domain User to access shares, etc... Since we keep the agent running as local system (which we could possibly change, just haven't gotten that far into this yet) these types of tasks will have issues.

For Linux: Sort of the same problem applies. We keep the agent running under its own user and give it access to do certain things on a system but not all of them, specifically, relating to our in house apps and anything dangerous root can do (which is almost everything).

What I was thinking of doing (at least initially) was a custom GUI showing events related to scheduled jobs and a method to start/stop a job that already exists on the system.


What were you thinking of?

[anrstone]

I suppose I was thinking along similar lines. A custom GUI to allow you to set up scheduled events and to allow events to depend upon the outcome of another event (e.g. FTP this file to X, run another task to do something with the file if the copy was succesfu (i.e. 2nd event depends upon success of first))

I was modelling my ideas on what I'd seen Control-M (BMC - kind of a market leader if you have endless amounts of money to spend!) do which is reasonably comprehensive. I was hoping to use Zabbix both for the agents and for the ability to raise events upon failure success etc.

Normally these enterprise schedulers allow you to set-up events and then order them on to a queue - so you kind of have the idea of event configuration and then publish when ready to go.

I take your point about the access permisisons which would need some thought and there's no magic here - the Control-m agent has to have full rights to what ever it needs to run as you would expect...

If you're intereted we could may be try and knock up a few ideas around this?

[Alexei]

Actually it is a very interesting topic! I do see high level of interest for task scheduling among Zabbix users and our customers. Anyone who is ready to save tons of cash and spend a small fraction on Zabbix development (instead of commercial licenses!) is welcome to start a discussion with us.

I think it is very likely that this functionality may be implemented in Zabbix if we find one, two or three companies seriously interested in this work.

[anrstone]

I'm happy to discuss contributing but I'm afraid that contribution may be quite small as we're not awash with cash! In many ways we're more likely to be able to garner support in terms of man hours of dev time.

I'm personally happy to contribute time both for development / requirements capture (especialy as I'm already doing some extensions for our own use in other areas) and I can probably gain access to some of the existing enterprise solutions to help focus that.

[Alexei]

The longest journey starts with the first step. Let's register it under https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT and start collecting requirements. I would be very happy if we could come up with something useful at the end.

[anrstone]

OK Great - I'll have an ask around and get some requirements based on some of the products I've used before - could you post a link to where you'd like the info to go under https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT

Thanks

[Alexei]

I registered it here: https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-216

Please feel free to contribute!

[jfischer]

I take your point about the access permisisons which would need some thought and there's no magic here - the Control-m agent has to have full rights to what ever it needs to run as you would expect...

I have written a patch that allows the ZABBIX agent to perform some operations with privileges while still running most stuff as its own user. Currently, it is only usable for log file monitoring but could be extended to perform other privileged tasks, too. It's available from the tracker, ZBXNEXT-195. It's a UNIX-only thing right now, tho.


Regards,
Jan

[anrstone]

That's great - I'm trying to gather some requirements together at the moment for the whole application so I'll post those up over the next week or so I guess.

[Alexei]

Excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing more details on this topic. It really looks like we have very nice foundation for this functionality, we just have to agree on what's missing.