Hi Alexei, Hi Forum!
After my first first day with Zabbix, I have to admit I am very impressed!
I have used BB and Nagios before, but I have never gotten a NMS
up and running to quickly, with only minimal doco study, including
a vast set of monitored values and graphs at hand.
Phew! What a great piece of software! Thank you very much!
I am still toying around with Z, and I have barely scratched the surface,
but before tomorrow's duties prevent me from giving you some feedback,
I'll post a list of things that have irritated and/or confused me on my way
today. See below.
Anyway, Three Cheers, again!
Holger
=== snip ===
- FIRST TIME USER SPEEDUP
* A nice, little diagram displaying the interdependency of the
Zabbix daemons would be helpful for novices.
- CONFIGURATION OF ACTIONS
* Condition selection field resets to "Templates" regardless of
previous value every time an Action is modified
* Despite some guys on the forum saying otherwise, this actually
works correctly in an email:
{TRIGGER.NAME}: {STATUS} (Value: {{HOSTNAME}:{TRIGGER.KEY}.last(0)})
* OTOH, in the same email, Port 80 availability {STATUS} is displayed
an "ON" -- when the "Value:" above reads "0" (and vice versa).
- CONFIGURATION OF TRIGGERS
* Confused me as hell, as I was looking for how to change the
threshold of a trigger. It took me two hours till I found out
that I have to select group "all" to allow me to change the
boundary values of a trigger (I worked on my "host list" all
the time.
* This subject (Changing Thresholds), is it documented anywhere?
I did not find anything, anyway.
* Also "consufing" ;-), do I always have to transfer a Trigger's
expression to an Action by hand all the time? I know it's not
really an issue, as I can set up a template one and then apply
it to new hosts, but for a Zabbix newbie it's just another
obstacle on his way. (Perhaps a listbox with all currently
defined expression could be implemented instead of the text
field?)
- SEVERITY CLASSIFICATION
* Having an event class AVERAGE slightly irritates me - sounds
like "half-meat-half-fish". How about INFO/WARN/ALERT/ESCALATE
only? Does anyone really need so many classifications?
- NAMING CONVENTION
* According to the forum, there seems to be some flux regarding
giving thins proper names. Here's my input:
ITEMS: IMO too much of a commonplace. MONITORS would be more
specific, as you use these "items" to monitor something, i.e.
you monitor disk space, you monitor port availability, etc.
TRIGGERS: Good, but THRESHOLDS would be more intuitive for
people to guess what this menu entry is good for.
The rest if fine to me.
- Monitoring -> Actions should rather be under Reports, as it is
a historical report about what happened, not actually anything
you monitor.
Perhaps I have not studied the doco carefully enough (I never do).
If so, please don't hesitate to be rude on me.
After my first first day with Zabbix, I have to admit I am very impressed!
I have used BB and Nagios before, but I have never gotten a NMS
up and running to quickly, with only minimal doco study, including
a vast set of monitored values and graphs at hand.
Phew! What a great piece of software! Thank you very much!
I am still toying around with Z, and I have barely scratched the surface,
but before tomorrow's duties prevent me from giving you some feedback,
I'll post a list of things that have irritated and/or confused me on my way
today. See below.
Anyway, Three Cheers, again!
Holger
=== snip ===
- FIRST TIME USER SPEEDUP
* A nice, little diagram displaying the interdependency of the
Zabbix daemons would be helpful for novices.
- CONFIGURATION OF ACTIONS
* Condition selection field resets to "Templates" regardless of
previous value every time an Action is modified
* Despite some guys on the forum saying otherwise, this actually
works correctly in an email:
{TRIGGER.NAME}: {STATUS} (Value: {{HOSTNAME}:{TRIGGER.KEY}.last(0)})
* OTOH, in the same email, Port 80 availability {STATUS} is displayed
an "ON" -- when the "Value:" above reads "0" (and vice versa).
- CONFIGURATION OF TRIGGERS
* Confused me as hell, as I was looking for how to change the
threshold of a trigger. It took me two hours till I found out
that I have to select group "all" to allow me to change the
boundary values of a trigger (I worked on my "host list" all
the time.
* This subject (Changing Thresholds), is it documented anywhere?
I did not find anything, anyway.
* Also "consufing" ;-), do I always have to transfer a Trigger's
expression to an Action by hand all the time? I know it's not
really an issue, as I can set up a template one and then apply
it to new hosts, but for a Zabbix newbie it's just another
obstacle on his way. (Perhaps a listbox with all currently
defined expression could be implemented instead of the text
field?)
- SEVERITY CLASSIFICATION
* Having an event class AVERAGE slightly irritates me - sounds
like "half-meat-half-fish". How about INFO/WARN/ALERT/ESCALATE
only? Does anyone really need so many classifications?
- NAMING CONVENTION
* According to the forum, there seems to be some flux regarding
giving thins proper names. Here's my input:
ITEMS: IMO too much of a commonplace. MONITORS would be more
specific, as you use these "items" to monitor something, i.e.
you monitor disk space, you monitor port availability, etc.
TRIGGERS: Good, but THRESHOLDS would be more intuitive for
people to guess what this menu entry is good for.
The rest if fine to me.
- Monitoring -> Actions should rather be under Reports, as it is
a historical report about what happened, not actually anything
you monitor.
Perhaps I have not studied the doco carefully enough (I never do).
If so, please don't hesitate to be rude on me.
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