My (professional) feedback

[zalex_ua]

yes, your request looks correct except 2 improvements - add .ARG<N> and ask if it can be used in trigger names (at least will be expanded in the notification).

Is time to create ZBXNEXT

[richlv]

No matter how it is documented NOW, it is very logical - to have THE SAME meaning of $1 $2 etc in triggers and items including trigger names. N-th parameter of the item key. This way if we change an item (change disk name from / to /usr for example) it can automatically change trigger name exactly as ir changes item name (very convenient).

just a quick note - that would most likely not work on any more complex trigger expressions, where there would be multiple items referenced. i'll try to respond to your latest long message as well at some point

[richlv]

Hmm, interesting to discover that I was unlucky to take VA few days before next had been released. And that 50% of observations are fixed already.

i guess that's better than the new version being worse

1) Virtual Appliance - ovfiormat is usually created by just exporting VM as virtual appliance; it is supported by Vmware ESXi (which is FREE anad which is THE ONLY production-grade free VMware - Vmware server is something better to forget about). So, while support of ovf format by OpenSuSe studio can be a great thing, I don't see why just don't create VM Linux, install and test everything and then export - and it can be ANY Linux.

much more involved upfront, requires more maintenance long term and doesn't provide other formats. with suse studio it is actually trivial

CentOS vs OpenSuSe. OpenSuSe is a great system. But it is not production system - it has life span of 3 years, while CentOS has it 7 years. This is one of the reasons why OpenSuSe is rarely used as a server platform while CentOS is the most popular free Linux for the servers. It's not important for me - I can install from scratch and I know SuSe even better then CentOs/RedHat, but it can be some limitation for others. We used OpenSuse as a servers but switched to CentOS because of this life time issue (and then it is little more stable). Anyway, I agree that VA platform is not so important and OpenSuSe is a good choice.

indeed, in this case the appliance isn't really expected to last too long, especially in a production environment
that might change later, of course.

X11 - I agree; while I require ALL servers to have GUI (it is disabled but ready for use, and it save a huge amount of time on troubleshooting and configuration), it is much easy to ADD x11 vs to remove, so VA should not have X11 except maybe xterm and 1 text editor (so if you slogin -X, you can use gui editor instead of ugly vi or emax).

hrm. did the bearded unix geeks already get you or are you successfully hiding ? ;D

Zabbix performance - VA had database with everything in a single file and with the weak mysql configuration (very small caches etc). Second is obvious (of course you don't want VA to use 4 GB of memory just for the demo), but first was a bug (my.cnf had table-per-file configuration but zabbix database was created without it. history tables partitioning can help as well. I don't know what exactly helped but I export zabbix database, imported it into newly configured mysql (VA was the same - 4 CPU. 3 GB memory, high priority, no CPU or memory reservations) and CPU usage dropped 3x - 4x. I did not investigate it, but of course VA should be configured more carefully.

1. increasing caches might be an option, although keeping the memory usage as low as possible would be also be important... maybe some hints on that in the appliance documentation ?

2. why would single file per table help ?

3. partitioning _definitely_ does not belong in the appliance, which is supposed to be as simple as possible

Minor comment - system shows number of unsupported items. If I can open them all , with exact error message for each of them, it could simplify setting dramatically (I see 2 unsupported items now - without an idea what they are about - I can't click on this number and see them all).

config->hosts, click on any items link, clear out host field & select item status "not supported"

Proposed view is very flexible - I would like to
- describe status bar parameters -you can define up to 3 status bars, each of 1 or more /by multi color/ parameters;
- describe _SHOW_ rule - for example _CPU > 10% or network usage > 10% of disk io > 100KB/second.

if something indeed flexible can be created, that would be nice. but yeah, detailed spec should be created elsewhere