Giving up on Zabbix

[JLambrecht]

I hope to be proven wrong as i did not have soo much time. Zabbix is okay on the feature side, though network discovery could be improved astronomically by supporting nmap ip scanning patterns instead of the limited one now in place.

After spending quite some time on Zabbix, reading documentation and posts i've come to the point of (almost) giving up. The lack of practically usefull documentation and 'broken' documentation is making my stomach turn at times.

If anything one would expect a VM appliance to work out of the box, which it apparenlty does not. Neither does it offer a simple way to upgrade to the latest version. It is a shame Zabbix is open-source because it is anything but 'open'. Though it does have a very interesting feature-set it is so hard to get to work as expected one rather looks away. Here specifically and only pointing at SNMP (and discovery)

Are there articles i did not read which are a MUST read ?

[Colttt]

can you read german??
take a look at this page: http://lab4.org/wiki/Hauptseite

what is you problem with zabbix?

[richlv]

what's the problem with appliance ? it does seem to work for me...
what's the problem with snmp ?
what's the problem with discovery ?

also, try #zabbix on freenode, as the amount of questions seems to be high for a single thread

[JLambrecht]

Thanks

Due to a lack of sleep i might have been a bit too strong on zabbix ;-) My point is i feel to be missing a good introduction to the way zabbix is working inside.

If the German Manual is handling Zabbix 2.x i'll have a shot at it, thanks.

Appliance - it is working fine so far, this is not the issue.

Discovery - Most of the problems are due to the way the network is configured to handle it's default route. Let's just say non-routed networks get routed as well and have a long TTL, as such the discovery process is slowing down to a halt.

SNMP - this is a tricky one i have not figured out yet, snmp queries from the commandline only work intermittenty. No idea why, yet. Obviously blocking snmp discovery.

I only have limited time at this site so i'm setting up a snmp-test-vm just to make i use the right procedure to set-up snmp monitoring.

[richlv]

Discovery - Most of the problems are due to the way the network is configured to handle it's default route. Let's just say non-routed networks get routed as well and have a long TTL, as such the discovery process is slowing down to a halt.

hmm, but that's not the problem with zabbix, is it ?

SNMP - this is a tricky one i have not figured out yet, snmp queries from the commandline only work intermittenty. No idea why, yet. Obviously blocking snmp discovery.

this doesn't sound like a problem with zabbix either, more like another (same ?) networking problem...

[qix]

I agree with you that there isn't enough introductionary material for Zabbix.
I tried to do my bit , see this thread: http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22211

It is a bit outdated since it is based on 1.8, but the techniques should still apply mostly.
I want to create a new set of labs and training material, but I'm lacking time/motivation currently.

Richlv's book should provide you with more insight if you need more information (also based on 1.8 though, http://www.packtpub.com/zabbix-1-8-n...onitoring/book)
As I understood from a Zabcon newsgroup post, Walterheck is currently compiling a book on Zabbix 2.0, so you might want to be on the lookout for that.

[rwright@pratt]

JLambrecht, I feel your pain. I am being forced to switch from Foglight to something free (foglight changed their pricing model) and my research brought me to Zabbix. However, I have to agree that the setup instructions lack some basic tips (or I overlooked them).

I downloaded the 2.0 appliance VM and have it up and running but I am struggling with it. I have been trying to get Zabbix to autodiscover my network but no luck so I installed the agent on one server and am trying to get it to see RAM, Processor utilization, disk space, etc but all it reports is ping and system uptime results.

I have several "items" setup for this server but Monitoring / Last Data only shows two items. One of them is "System Uptime" showing as "1837517" and I have yet to figure out how to get it to display as "Days Hrs Sec" or if that is even possible.

Little things like this frustrate me because I know someone who has used Zabbix for awhile knows how to do it but I just wish it was easier to find for us newbies.

[richlv]

I downloaded the 2.0 appliance VM and have it up and running but I am struggling with it. I have been trying to get Zabbix to autodiscover my network but no luck so I installed the agent on one server and am trying to get it to see RAM, Processor utilization, disk space, etc but all it reports is ping and system uptime results.

i'd suggest opening a new thread about this in the help section.
quick idea (but please, make a new thread ! ) - "Server" parameter in agent daemon config file might be misconfigured, assuming you try to use passive items

I have several "items" setup for this server but Monitoring / Last Data only shows two items. One of them is "System Uptime" showing as "1837517" and I have yet to figure out how to get it to display as "Days Hrs Sec" or if that is even possible.

change units for that item to 'uptime'.

[rwright@pratt]

Thanks RichLV, I do have a post in the help section and I am reviewing the documents and links provided earlier.
Didn't mean to hijack the thread.

Changing it to Uptime worked so thanks!

[Jason]

Don't give up...

Yes, I don't think zabbix documentation is perfect (actually far from it in some areas) but it is getting slowly better. Once you get beyond the initial stages and start experimenting with scripting and other methods you quickly discover the power of this to monitor pretty much anything.