Easy Questions

[Amnizee]

Hello everyone !

My compagny is looking for a good monitoring software.

Zabbix looks like a good tool for that. However, I have few questions.


1) Is Windows 7 (32 ans 64) Supported - Working ? (NO in the documentation)
2) Why *beeeeeep* is it written in C ? Maybe v2 in C++ ? Way easier to understand the code, no ?
3) Is it possible to configure a device via snmp with Zabbix ?


Thank you for your time ! And have a great day.

[nelsonab]

Zabbix looks like a good tool for that. However, I have few questions.

It is, I've been a convert/evangelist for about 5 years. I cringe when I look at other systems now.

1) Is Windows 7 (32 ans 64) Supported - Working ? (NO in the documentation)

I cannot answer to this, hopefully someone else can. Why are you looking to monitor workstations?

2) Why *beeeeeep* is it written in C ? Maybe v2 in C++ ? Way easier to understand the code, no ?

C is what Alexei first started writing Zabbix in *many* years ago, why? Probably because it's fast. Yes some tradeoffs come with using C, but over the years I've started to see that tradeoff gap narrow as the libraries that Zabbix has have matured.

Also like any maturing software project switching mid stream to a new language is never simple, and brings with it a whole new slew of bugs and restarts. Yes the Zabbix code is complex, but it is not impossible to understand.

3) Is it possible to configure a device via snmp with Zabbix ?

No, Zabbix is not a configuration management tool. You can however monitor SNMP devices pretty well with Zabbix. Configuration is challenging, but there is a plugin project to make SNMP configuration a breeze within Zabbix.

[Amnizee]

It is, I've been a convert/evangelist for about 5 years. I cringe when I look at other systems now.

Good answer, haha

I cannot answer to this, hopefully someone else can. Why are you looking to monitor workstations?

My compagny creates their own things (Hardware and Software).

We need to test our Softwares on every M$ OSs. (Even a Vista Server...)

It would be awesome to Monitor them.

C is what Alexei first started writing Zabbix in *many* years ago, why? Probably because it's fast. Yes some tradeoffs come with using C, but over the years I've started to see that tradeoff gap narrow as the libraries that Zabbix has have matured.

Also like any maturing software project switching mid stream to a new language is never simple, and brings with it a whole new slew of bugs and restarts. Yes the Zabbix code is complex, but it is not impossible to understand.

Ok, so no migration in process ? That's ok.

No, Zabbix is not a configuration management tool. You can however monitor SNMP devices pretty well with Zabbix. Configuration is challenging, but there is a plugin project to make SNMP configuration a breeze within Zabbix.

Great ! thanks a lot ! I'll take a look at the plugin !!



Again, thank your you help !!

[jthakrar]

You can monitor your software even if there is no "OS agent" for your s/w.
It will be helpful if you can answer a few simple questions -
What is your software?
What do you want to monitor within your software?
Does your s/w have a "listener port"?
Does your s/w "interact" with "external entities" via web services, or the like?

I am using Mikoomi to monitor "web services" and other apps (e.g. WebSphere) without installing any agents on the target servers. It is all done using "externa check" scripts which extract all the monitoring information.

The same approach is also used to monitor a remote JVM - without installing the Zabbix standard zapcat. You can check out www.mikoomi.com for the JVM example I referred here.

[Kerrygeek]

Depending on what you need to monitor on those Windows boxes you can do it with SNMP and you might not even need the agents installed. I'm monitoring lots of Windows servers (and a few workstations) with SNMP but I'm only looking at bandwidth on the network interfaces and CPU utilization. If you want much more than that you'll need to use the agent.

If you want to see what is available with SNMP, just do snmpwalk against a windows box and see what it gives you. You'll have to install it on the Windows boxes, I don't think it's part of the default install but it's easy to add. Then set SNMP to start automatically and give it the community string and the address of your Zabbix box so it will accept SNMP requests from that address.

Good luck!
Kerry