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**Gerco** · 13-06-2007, 13:45

I would like a way to send a large number of items to Zabbix via the Zabbix sender interface. Currently, i use my own implementation of zabbix_sender (in Java) to be able to send items to Zabbix.

I need to send several hundred items per minute and each item requires me to create a tcp connection, send a bit of Xml and close the connection. It would be great if I could just keep the connection open between the bits of Xml, that would save a great deal of overhead.

The ability to write a partial agent would also work great for my purposes. That way I could just start a regular Zabbix agent and my own agent (within SonicMQ, the product I use) together. Zabbix would then need to be able to query multiple agents per host. This seems to be a more scaleable solution.

**swaterhouse** · 13-06-2007, 14:28

For me escalations are the biggest missing piece right now. I would like to see that in 1.6 for sure.

The other major issue is documentation. The manual is better than it was for 1.1 but it is still lacking - especially for newbies. The installation portion has several issues with it including wrong paths to database scripts and a couple of missing steps. I wrote a step by step guide on the wiki for CentOS so I understand how hard it is to write documentation but its really important for the success of the project. I am a fairly new linux admin and no where near an expert but I have installed several server applications on linux and zabbix was one of the hardest I have done so far, mostly due to lack of documentation/wrong information. If this was the first server app on linux I ever used, I definately would have given up and looked for something else easier to install.

Another minor thing would be to use the results of snmpwalk (including the ability to link into an mib file) to load a template for monitoring a device via snmp.

Thanks for all your efforts, Zabbix has been great and I am looking forward to 1.4.1 so I can upgrade my 1.1.6 installation and take advantage of all the new features!

**StanZoid** · 13-06-2007, 16:51

You asked for it! Here are some suggestions I have:

1. Slideshows should be able to show standard Zabbix pages in addition to screens defined by the administrator. I would love to show the Monitoring/Triggers page, for example. As an alternative, a gizmo for screen building could be made to show only true triggers.

2. Web testing should include the ability to take returned values and use them in subsequent steps. I can't test my web farm adequately without the ability to pass and use a session id.

3. More reports aimed at operations. Since the reports section is weak, why not give the ability to add SQL statements or scripts as custom reports via the interface?

4. Escalations, please. Pretty please.

5. Auto creation of triggers as items are created would be cool.

6. Documentation.

7. The configure hosts page lists the templates in the middle of the page. In my environment, some hosts have many templates, which pushes the balance of the columns off the screen. Maybe move the templates linked column to the right of the page?

8. Report formats for printing or export to other programs for analysis and presentation, as in spreadsheet-compatible formats.

9. A presentation mode suitable for a Network Operations Center. The slideshow is a start, but it needs more presence, easier diagnosis and more compact presentation of information.

10. The overview page in monitoring is useless when you have specialized machinery being monitored. I have several servers that have tens of triggers unique to those servers, making the overview an exercise in paging down. Can this be compressed , a la host groups and applications, so that a single screen can handle an overview?

11. How about a clone host function that builds a new host and all associated items/triggers and template connections?

12. Allow an agent to do the web testing if so configured. I need a remote web tester to validate that websites hosted internally are visible externally.

13. Allow maps to use the value of one item as a secondary label.

14. Actions should allow an action to specify a media type in addition to a group or person. A single action could then be used to target media as well as people.

15. Other graph formats?

16. Log monitoring where there are many logs on a server takes a lot of server resources. I have an environment where any of a group of binaries will be implemented many times, each generating an identical but separate log, and this is not easy with current zabbix monitoring without loading the server. I don't know how to fix this, or if it need fixing, but it is one spot I wrestle with.

OK, enough gripes. Things I like are:

1. Hurrah for export/import. I use it to quickly build new hosts and attach items and triggers, and to backup configurations.

2. Web testing is cool. Would be cooler with #2.

3. The whole interface feels tighter and better built. Not as polished as some, but it allows a certain flexibility that I like.

4. Screens are wonderful!

5. IT services rock! If they were just documented enough to use...

6. The forum is tremendous. Alexei, thanks for frequenting and responding, and thanks to those who have answered many of my questions. The user community is great.

Your competition in the free monitoring world is getting better. Presentation and documentation are the weak spot relative to others that I have seen. Your functionality and flexibility are strong points. I am aiming to get Zabbix ready to hand off to an Operations group that may not know how to use it, so the interface is increasingly important, both in ease of use and presentability.

Keep up the great work!

Stanzoid

**James Wells** · 13-06-2007, 17:32

Greetings,

There are a number of things I would like to see i the next version;

Improved Agent / Server communication. At present when an agent collects it's list of items, it gets, the item key_ and periodicity. It then goes off on it's merry way and sends item updates as directed by the periodicity. When the agent sends the data to the server, it sends the key_ and the value, and a few other bits of information, such as hostname. The server then has to perform a lookup against the items table and the hosts table to find the right item to be updated.

What I would like to see is the agent and the server change this communication to instead send itemid, instead of key_, this will eliminate the need to perform the host lookup, and greatly reduce the number of rows that need to be queried on the item table lookup.
A complete rework of the UI. One of the biggest issues I have with the UI is that the bulk of the information is processed inline instead of in functions. This means that to fix the way some of the data is displayed, you need to edit multiple files.

What I would like to see instead, is move many of the repetitive display code chunks into more functions, This will make it much easier in the future to convert to Smarty, Drupal, Seagull, etc. Additionally, using more functions, would make things a great deal easier when extra features are added as you woild not have to go back and re-invent the wheel as often. A good example of this was the Severity Level code. In 1.1.x, prior to my bulk patches, this code was replicated 8 times, and each of the 8 was different from the others.
Repeating Messages / Escalation. I am unclear as to why both of these features were removed. In early 1.1 development, we had escalations, then they were removed without comment or explanation. In early 1.4 development, we had repeat notifications, as we had had throughout 1.1.x, and then near the end of 1.4 development, we were told that repeat notifications were being removed, but not why.

I would like to see both of these features returned to Zabbix, along with a mechanism, similar to my acknowledgments in place to control escalations and repeat notifications.
Better Communication. Since Ossimy became a developer, I have seen maybe 5 messages from him, and only a few dozen from Alexei, actually talking about the code and where it can be improved and how. Zabbix has a developers mailing list, that has received only a two emails in the last 24 months, and both of them were from me.

What I would like to see is better communication between the community and the developers. We need more timely responses to our patch submissions, we need Alexei and Eugene to critique the patches that we submit. At the same time, we, meaning the community, need to be able to provide feedback and critique of their code as well. Basically, we need to know that you are listening to us and our ideas.

Finally, we, meaning the community, need to be able to feel that we are wanted / needed. When I became a developer, I was the first person outside of SIA Zabbix to become one. Since then, over 24 months now, no other person has been allowed to join.

**StanZoid** · 14-06-2007, 00:11

One more gripe--I would like to be able to acknowledge multiple triggers with one action. If there are 25 triggers true due to a single event, the same ack message should apply to all, so why not ack them all together? The paradigm of check all to acknowledge comes to mind here.

Stanzoid

**bbrendon** · 14-06-2007, 02:29

I haven't used 1.4 yet but I can picture it clearly from reading the forums.

My ideas... please note that 99% of my Zabbix is based on active checks, so all this should work in that capacity.

1. Escalations/Repeats/Acknowledgments

2. A better method to deploy custom parameters to agents. Basically, I would like the agents to download the scripts (vbs, sh,pl,etc scripts) and stuff so I can manage everything from one computer/UI.

3. Reports. Pie graphs, easy to read reports, stuff managers would like. If this isn't included, maybe some tutorials on how to generate custom reports using a 3rd party reporting library or application?

4. Encrypted agent communication (similar to puppet maybe)

**bobrivers** · 14-06-2007, 06:55

My opinions

Hi,

My suggestions:

1) MAPS

It would be great if I could include "graphical" elements (such as lines, squares, clouds, labels, etc...) and not only "monitored" elements into maps. So I could use it to document my environment. It's great to show it to managers and buy-in sponsorship...

Today maps has a little "bug": if I have two(or more) links between two elements, they are overlayed. For instance: I have router A and router B. Between A and B I have one link from carrier X and another from carrier Y. Today, I can't map it correctly. So, it's necessary to check if users registered mode than one link.

I didn't found where to upload new images/icons, or where I can replace the default ones. An interface to upload it would be good.

2) INVENTORY/HOST PROFILE

I would like to use zabbix as my CMDB. So the profile must be improved. First it's necessary to add some basic fields, such as category, type, date of purchase, warranty period/type/expiration date. Ability to upload multiple files (manuals, contracts, procedures, etc) with descriptions. Or instead of just one url, multiple urls (with descriptions) so I could store the files into the server and then link then with the host. CMDB is much more complex, but it's necessary to start at some point.

3) EVENTS

Ability to report "voluntary" events. If I have a programmed maintenance, how do I report it to zabbix? I don't want to stop zabbix to monitor it during the maintenance (I like to know my total unavailability), but I would like to mark it as a programmed incident. So, I could exclude it (if I want) from my SLA. I know that I can write comments, but I'm going a little bit further.

And I would like to group events into problems. Let's say that was necessary to replace server's network card. Of course that zabbix will throw lots of events (and as I said, I want it to be registered). But instead of doing comments one by one, I could group it, give it a label and apply a common comment.

4) REPORTS

Every day (and I consolidate it monthly) I produce a "Operation Report" where I summarize the incidents/problems that occurred. If I could use zabbix to do it, it would be great. I need to report when, where, duration, why and solution. Zabbix is almost there, but it needs some adjustments to make it more usable (item 3).

**rxm8028** · 14-06-2007, 16:12

Discovery improvements

I think a nice addition to 1.6 would be the use of 'OS Fingerprinting' in the discovery code. Something like nmap does, examining open ports and so forth to make an educated guess at the detected device OS. Zabbix could then apply an appropriate template automatically. Templates for various known device types could be included by default (and of course, more could be contributed by the community). Data gathered from items in the templates could be used to populate the Inventory, too.

The ability to do this could make it possible to create Zabbix 'appliances' that almost anyone could install and begin using right away, without the large amount of up-front time required to create a usable configuration.

I realize this is not a trivial addition, but it would certainly be a great enhancement. Perhaps some of this is already included in 1.4; I haven't been able to make my 1.1.6 to 1.4 upgrade function well enough to really check it out yet.

Thanks,
Ross

**richlv** · 15-06-2007, 15:11

a minor feature idea : more possible states for links in maps.
currently a link can be associated to a single trigger and change colour depending on this trigger.
would be nice, if several (at least two) triggers could be added, with priorities.
for example, a link could have two triggers linked, one that detects link down, other - slow response. when ping time would exceed threshold (thet is, one trigger would go true), link would get yellow. when the seccond trigger goes on, link becomes red.

Originally posted by James Wells

Better Communication.
...
What I would like to see is better communication between the community and the developers. We need more timely responses to our patch submissions, we need Alexei and Eugene to critique the patches that we submit. At the same time, we, meaning the community, need to be able to provide feedback and critique of their code as well. Basically, we need to know that you are listening to us and our ideas.

Finally, we, meaning the community, need to be able to feel that we are wanted / needed. When I became a developer, I was the first person outside of SIA Zabbix to become one. Since then, over 24 months now, no other person has been allowed to join.

this is getting more and more important.
irc channel is partially dead. wiki (which would be the frontline of community involvement) is not taking off. forum is used as a primary communications channel, bug tracker and whatnot...

i understand that implementing new infrastructure components is not easy or trivial, but - zabbix bugzilla would be really, really great. hunting forums for problems, patches and workarounds is not quite productive

also, this would give zabbix team more experience regarding zabbix-bugtracker integration

here i've come to a feature request i saw - escalations and so on. i believe that most people who implement this in a monitoring solution would in some time outgrow it's capabilities and require decent bugtracker. and migration later is more painful.
so, integration with a decent tracker (ideally, as a pluggable solution so that moduls for other systems could be easily developed later, hopefully by the community, too) could be more fruitful.

an opensource project health is mostly determined by how vibrant, large and disparate the community is. the more closed it is, the larger are associated risks, which can turn away new users,

**sspyrison** · 15-06-2007, 15:50

Originally posted by swaterhouse

For me escalations are the biggest missing piece right now. I would like to see that in 1.6 for sure.

Heck, I'd like to see "escalations" in 1.4.1.

imo it is core functionality in a monitoring package. This missing piece keeps zabbix out of our environment and in eval stage.

The other big one for me in 1.1 was not being able to assign multiple templates to a host, but that seems to be possible now in 1.4.

Other than that, thanks for your work on a good product, hopefully I'll have more time soon to eval 1.4 and post more detailed comments.

**jgordor** · 15-06-2007, 16:40

Some ideas

Hi,

In addition:
- Graphs in emails notifications
- Custom reports by email (can be screens)

Thanks

**rraver** · 15-06-2007, 21:53

Screen Items, Graphing, and Reporting

Screen Options - Allowing more custom screen data when trying to build screens would be very helpful. Allow you to staticically define a field and then insert a value after it. A better interface for positioning and build the screen. Also customized items like grabbing the last 25 events that happened to a certain host would be very helpful.

Reporting - It would be nice to have reports mailed out in PDF format of custome timelines for graphs each day. There is a lot of people that ask for daily reporting in upper management and for archive use.

Graphing - Having a better graphing interface to manipulate the timeline would be great. I have to say that Cacti does have a better way to maipulate the graphs where you can drag a square over the area you want to zoom in on. SVG I have seen to be a great interface for this.

Escalations - I think this has been addressed enough by everyone else.

**knarfling** · 18-06-2007, 16:32

Escalations

Escalations - I think this has been addressed enough by everyone else.

Actually, I don't think it has. I was REALLY hoping that this would be addressed by 1.4. Zabbix cannot really be and enterprise monitoring system until it has 3 things.

1. Distributed monitoring. Until 1.4 this was lacking. While many small businesses have only one location, some small businesses and many large businesses have multiple locations that need to be monitored.

2. Secure communications between nodes. Although it is possible to set up SSH tunnels and VPN's, this is Zabbix NEEDS to have a built in feature to provide secure communication.

3. Escalations. The only reason I am still allowed to use Zabbix is because I have created multiple triggers to simulate escalation, and promised that it would be included in a future release. In EVERY organization that I have worked with, management does not want to leave it to the tech to keep things running. They want to be paged when there is a serious problem, but only if the problem is serious. They want to know that a tech or admin has been paged, that that person has responded and that the problem is being fixed. But they do not want to be bothered by little things.

I cannot stress enough the importance of escalations or the need for it to be included in Zabbix. I think that a LOT of people wanted it in 1.4, but only a few really asked for it. Most of us (me included) thought that it would be included, and since a few had already asked for it, we didn't speak up. Perhaps if we has communicated just how important escalations are, we might have had them included in the 1.4 release.

**richlv** · 18-06-2007, 16:59

Originally posted by knarfling

In EVERY organization that I have worked with, management does not want to leave it to the tech to keep things running. They want to be paged when there is a serious problem, but only if the problem is serious. They want to know that a tech or admin has been paged, that that person has responded and that the problem is being fixed. But they do not want to be bothered by little things.

well, i would guess that most organisations where this would matter have a decent (or at least some) helpdesk system. so a normal use case would be monitoring system opening an issue at the helpdesk system, which would handle different advanced notifications, escalations and whatnot (keeping some reserve notification channel inside monitoring system for things like helpdesk system not working

)

so far integrating zabbix with these systems has not been trivial (part of this is to blame on helpdesk systems, too).
it would seem more logical to work towards improving integration with helpdesk systems/bug trackers, instead of bolting helpdesk functionality on top of a monitoring solution.

i find it hard to believe that any decently sized organisation would keep two different escalation schemes, one in helpdesk system, other - in monitoring system.

in any case, it seems that this topic deserves a separate thread to avoid polluting this one.

though i hope feature request list eventually makes it into the wiki

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