Scheduled reporting of server health in PDF and others

[gkrishna]

Hi All,

I am new to Zabbix, Can somebody help on how to schedule server health report daily with CPU and RAM status in a PDF format and send them using Email.

Note: I have installed and configured basic zabbix server and agent. Do I need to install any specific modules for PDF or any others to be installed, please advice.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks,
Krishna

[kloczek]

Things like this highly depends on set of metrics which you already are sampling.
In other words first you need to spend some time on what you are monitoring and understand context of your monitoring needs than define reports.
Those reports content and presentation layer may highly depend on who will be reading those reports.

Nevertheless usually reporting is not needed as zabbix themselves is nothing more than reporting tool .. reporting live state of the monitored objects

[gkrishna]

Hi kloczek,

Thanks for replying to the post. I understand that zabbix itself is a reporting tool, but i have a requirement of sending the status of the server CPU usage and RAM usage every day. Our application is having performance issue and just to make sure that before start of the day all the servers health is fine, we need to send this report.

Your help on this is highly appreciated.

Thanks,
gkrishna

[kloczek]

Look .. system like Linux provides more than 50 metrics about memory usage (check "wc -l /proc/meminfo").
At the moment zabbix agent is able to map to the items values about 1/5 of those metric.
(you just recalled me that I must submit my agent patch to monitor huge pages on Linux )
In case of other systems like Solaris it is even more metric related of memory/RAM usage (IIRC Solaris kstat command provides +100 metrics about memory usage)

You need to be a bit more precise when you are telling "memory usage"

Again .. if you want to report something first you need to define enough precisely what you want to report (-> define set of your metrics)

[gofree]

Hi gkrishna

Ive been struggling with similar managment request in the past - it was painfull

The most reasonable way I think is to setup grafana integration and somehow get thos screens from grafana dashboards....being said it also not so easy to make it work ( comments from kloczek still apply )

Just for fun see here( or google something like grafana report schedule )

https://www.bujarra.com/generando-informes-con-grafana-y-programar-su-envio/?lang=en

[gofree]

and some bits and pieces

https://www.neteye-blog.com/2019/07/exporting-grafana-graphics-as-a-pdf/

[kloczek]

and some bits and pieces
https://www.neteye-blog.com/2019/07/...hics-as-a-pdf/

There are few tenths of converters from web pages to pdf.
If you are using chrome or firefox you can install some extensions which can do that on one click.
Nevertheless IMO putting today some reports in pdf is like trying to publish newspapers on early stages of the internet which content of some web sites

Biggest problem of the monitoring is not putting some data in form of pdf but to what and how some data needs to be presented and that process only a bit can be done using some software because software no matter how intelligent (with no matter how many "ifs") cannot still well categorise what is important and what is not.

I'm working on my templates almost all the time to refine some results of some exact needs in some exact situations. This is almost sure kind of never-ending-story process ..
For example after I've added on Linux monitoring active/inactive memory metrics almost two years ago only few days ago I found that because LXC still has mo proper separation of the total memory from the LXC container from physical system exactly that graph shows good-enough(tm) actual memory usage inside of the LXC container.

PS. I should commit probably today in devel branch new batch of the "OS Linux" template changes.

[gofree]

the whole idea is not about just convert the page to pdf - scheduled email are sometimes requested by those older "newspaper age" managers,planners,project managers, etc - if you dont teach them to something like grafana ( just click a link sometimes ) or they just want email with pdf you're very limited with in house zabbix reporting capabilities

[gkrishna]

gofree i totally agree with your comment

[KBlasz]

Definitely don't agree with the notion that zabbix does not need a scheduled reporter by default. There are many benefits to daily/weekly and monthly reports. Currently its the only thing that Zabbix does not do better than other monitoring systems like PRTG. Luckily Zabbix has a good API subsystem that Grafana and other third party application can dip into to generate these reports. I am currently using powershell and task scheduler to send the report out daily for situations that dont require access to zabbix web interface.

[kitadisa]

Note: I have installed and configured basic zabbix server and agent. Do I need to install any specific modules for PDF or any others to be installed, please advice.

[gofree]

there is no official module module that can be installed, some unofficial community attemps that you can find in forum are in my opinion not worth it ( eg not ready for production environment ) and who knows if they even work with version5 - the problem is that if you make it work somehow for one version even a small update of zabbix can break your with custom crafted setup

https://www.zabbix.com/forum/zabbix-cookbook/25368-zabbix-dynamic-pdf-report-generation

in short - youre on your own and the best approach would be to write something that is utilizing zabbix API