Zabbix Frontend: Web Service Implementation and Integration of ExtJS?

[Felicitus]

Hi,

I'm using Zabbix for a couple of days now (I used Zabbix more intensively a few years ago, so I'm not that new ) and noticed quite some drawbacks: The user interface. Often it doesn't do what I expect; and it is sometimes hard to quickly navigate through it.

While in some places the AJAX-Train already has arrived (and thus also gives me a better user experience), it is missing in many other places. Screen Configuration, Graph Building etc.

As I'm a big fan of ExtJS (http://www.extjs.com), I'm wondering if such a thing is already planned. I know that a complete rewrite of the frontend is a big task; so it might be a good idea to start implemeting an alternative frontend based on the new Zabbix API.

For me, configuration isn't the most important thing, but rather to get the information at my fingertips as quickly as possible. Currently, if you try to navigate to items, it takes a page load every time, which increases time.

An excellent example is the dashboard of Zabbix; you can't move the blocks around an you also can't build custom blocks. To see an example ExtJS dashboard implementation, click here.

What do you guys think?

cheers,
Felicitus


EDITED: I did miss the new Zabbix API. Corrected the post.

[QuakENT]

ye it will by nice to have ajax frontend and zabbix team already sas, that they planing ajax for 2. version. So you must wait 2-3 years? for that or do it yourself, which is mantra on this forum
I must admit..it could by a little frustrating if the other project like Pandora FMS make such a quick progress compare to zabbix project. But if you dont put too much time and resources to this yet, you can always switch to another solution where ajax already is.

[Felicitus]

The selling point here is not to switch to a product that uses AJAX - it just makes a good product better. I have no interest in switching from Zabbix to something else, simply because it has proven in recent projects that it is mature already. If you first concentrate on nice GUIs and then on the core functionality, you'll be off the road sooner than you estimate.

[QuakENT]

. If you first concentrate on nice GUIs and then on the core functionality, you'll be off the road sooner than you estimate.

I agree with that. But on other side, whats the point of having great functionality if you cant access that functionality? You can have Bmw engine, but if you put it into Trabant then result will be definitely unsatisfying.

Btw. I will be carefull with word "mature"...there is still much work to do for basic things-features which can one need for mature deployment. But we can say that progress is slow but continues.

[Felicitus]

I agree with that. But on other side, whats the point of having great functionality if you cant access that functionality? You can have Bmw engine, but if you put it into Trabant then result will be definitely unsatisfying.

Yes, that's exactly my point. I've read somewhere that an updated frontend is planned for Zabbix 2.0 - Alexei, can you maybe confirm that? If that's the case, I'll put my ideas on hold. If not, I will start writing down some concepts while doing my daily Zabbix work.

Btw. I will be carefull with word "mature"...there is still much work to do for basic things-features which can one need for mature deployment. But we can say that progress is slow but continues.

Yes, that's also true. You know, I usually decide within an hour after I install a product if it makes sense to me. I tried quite many NMS - like OpenNMS, Nagios and ZenOSS. Honestly, I dropped them all because I found it very hard to grasp the concepts behind these. I also don't like the fact that you need to manually edit configuration files on a filesystem and restart the NMS afterwards (I later learned that you can soft-restart the daemons - but that's a documentation issue). Zabbix seemed to be most intuitive from the beginning, and that still is the case. Of course, you need to dig into the manual sometimes, but IMHO less often than other products.

My aim is to increase intuitiveness and implement a better workflow, primary goal is for the daily work, secondary goal is for the initial setup. I believe that most people considering Zabbix only have a few servers to monitor, thus they need a solution which also fits for a small server/infrastructure landscape and is easy to setup, yet scales when the infrastructure grows.