Call for discussion on ZABBIX 1.6

[akschu]

Adjustable intervals for simple checks would be real nice. I implemented the pinger and it's out of control.

schu

[mucknet]

in cacti they use xml file to define index polling like this...

<interface>
        <name>Alteon Group Actives sessions</name>
        <description>get Alteon Actives sessions for Group</description>
        <oid_index>.1.3.6.1.4.1.1872.2.5.4.2.3.1.1</oid_index>
        <index_order>ifName:ifIndex</index_order>
        <index_order_type>numeric</index_order_type>
        <index_title_format>|chosen_order_field|</index_title_format>

        <fields>
                <ifIndex>
                        <name>Index</name>
                        <method>walk</method>
                        <source>value</source>
                        <direction>input</direction>
                        <oid>.1.3.6.1.4.1.1872.2.5.4.2.3.1.1</oid>
                </ifIndex>

                <ifName>
                        <name>Group Name</name>
                        <method>walk</method>
                        <source>value</source>
                        <direction>input</direction>
                        <oid>.1.3.6.1.4.1.1872.2.5.4.1.1.3.4.1.10</oid>
                </ifName>

                <currSess>
                        <name>Actives Sessions</name>
                        <method>get</method>
                        <source>value</source>
                        <direction>output</direction>
                        <oid>.1.3.6.1.4.1.1872.2.5.4.2.3.1.2</oid>
                </currSess>
        </fields>
</interface>

i think can be in database in zabbix...

to poll the complete list of the Altheon VIP like that without to configure manualy...

http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/...query_xml.html

and the same for external script...
http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/...query_xml.html

in that way when on this equipement i add new VIP they are atomaticly add in monitoring...

best regards,
Mathieu

I can't agree with this more. I would love to see zabbix effectively take advantage of SNMP tables.

Here is a thread I started once on the subject: http://zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5726

[GateKeeper]

I want to vote for FreeBSD support.

I can't understand why net.if.in/out, system.uptime, system.users etc... aren't supported by agent while supported by Net-SNMP or OS-self utils.

[testos]

Grouping host groups

Hi

In large bussines environments is essential to be able grouping host groups to 5 levels nesting, at least.

Regards

[pabloadmin]

ideas

I am working with zabbix since the version 1.0, and though is true that has had many improvements, it still has some weak points like:
Is difficult to trace items, generate reports and do maps. I has some ideas could be help:


- Embed the webui with any cms like mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com/)

- Drag&drop for maps, is a hard work put the object with x-y coordinates.

- Objects to use in the maps without monitoring, like racks, doors, square or any object.
for example: http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthre...?p=967#post967

- Trace for a specify items with a centralized log data viewer.

- More templates examples for jboss/jeronimo/tomcat , active mq, apache web server.
Many contributions from forums can be centralized in a general repository with template format (such exported xml from zabbix).

- Quality about each custom item, a ranking with a mount time to get the value, time outs counts, values counts. This is to fix pour scripts, prevent cuts at graphs or lose data.

thank you.

[qix]

Hello all,

Please first let me explain what our company does and where we use Zabbix for.

We are a application hosting (mostly SAP and Microsoft) company.
We have 2 data centers with machines from different clients that are seperated from each other with firewalls.
Every client has its own heterogeneous environment.

Furthermore we manage systems for clients that are located on the site of the client, so we need to remotely monitor these machines. For large environments we could maybe deploy a sepate distributed Zabbix server. However, this has not yet been done.

Finally we provide network couplings for clients ranging from VPN, MPLS and internet connectivity.

We can provide a fully redundant setup for the hosting of applications.
We can even dynamically failover a application that is primarily running in one data center to the other, including every incoming connection to the application (MPLS, VPN, etc).

As you can imagine this is a complex and dynamic environment with machines from different clients that cannot be allowed to communicate to each other.

We have been using Zabbix (currently 1.1.3) as our primary monitoring solution for about a year now.

We use the Zabbix groups to differentiate our clients in Zabbix (one group per client).

With this background I have the following list of improvements for the next release of Zabbix which would greatly improve the value of Zabbix in our environment.

Encryption of data traffic between server and client.
My preffered choice would be to have a shared secret key that is defined in the zabbix agent config file in combination with a preshared key that could be set as a group attribute. Alternatively this might also be set by means of an "application".

High Availabilty
Distributed monitoring in 1.4 seems very promising to resolve the "blackout" of monitoring during the failure of WAN links between our locations, but in case of a server (hardware) failure, monitoring will be lost.
I would like to see automatic failover for polling agents and devices from a secondary server once a hartbeat with a primary server has been lost. Load-balancing between the two would be the sprinkles on the topping

Template based scheduled reports
For trends and reporting I require reports on our servers/components based on Disk/Mem/CPU/etc. usage for the past day/week/month/year all put on a nice page with graphs. I Would also really like to add tables with item values and availability percentages to these reports. Receiving them by mail on scheduled intervals would reduce a large amount of work we need to do now.

SNMP Community on host basis
SNMP community strings should be an host or (even better) a group parameter.
Everyone of our clients uses a different community string in their separate environment and now we need to build a template tree for every client and work from there, this can become very cumbersome with 50+ clients.

Maintenance windows
I would like to specify a planned maintenance on a group and on separate machines so I can disable triggers and actions for the specified host/group during a preset time/date range so planned maintenance doesn't result in SMS messages being send to the on-call officer during the nightly hours.

Event search for hosts and groups based on date/time range
One of my main aggravations in using Zabbix on a daily basis is that I can only browse through the events 100 events at a time. I would really, really like to be able to run a query on a date/time basis so I can see what triggers activated on a certain host on monday two weeks ago or last night.

History of events for specific host/group in a screen instead of generic
I make screens on a per client basis which rotate in a slide show styled manner. These show the hosts status in a map and several graphs as well.
I would like to show the last events for this client in this screen as well. (based on a group)

Use of flexible interval in case of no response
It would be really handy to use the flexible interval to adjust the poll interval if there is no initial response.
For example, we ping a host every 300 seconds to see if it is still reachable. When we don't receive echo-replies, the flexible interval kicks in setting the poll interval to 10 seconds. This will allow for a faster way of determining if a host is really down and when it comes back up again. (don't need to wait five minutes for the next poll)

Last(x) to work as a timeout value
Last time I checked ".last(0)" in a trigger just selected the last occurrence.
I would like a way to not activate a trigger until a certain period has passed.
For example, we test a server for reachability on a faulty line. This means that the server might be up, but we may have a short problem with packets traversing the network. If I could delay the trigger from activating for say 5 minutes, we have a chance that there will be a successful connection to the server in that time, thus the trigger doesn't become active.
We monitor several not so important servers on a faulty link at this moment that generate about 300 events a day while the trigger is reset within 2 minutes every time it becomes active. This results in a lot of false positives which means people are less likely to respond when the trigger becomes active for real (e.g. server died).

Escalations
I would like to see a system that sends out a message to an on-call officer that forces him to acknowledge a trigger when appropriate (for our 24/7 customers) within a specified time. When there is no acknowledgment, it needs to resend the message. After a defined number of retries the system needs to start sending messages to the 2nd on-call officer so he can acknowledge the trigger. Of course, it should also retry sending the message when no acknowledgment arrives.

Acknowledge a trigger by email.
If the above could be realized, it would be a plus if the on-call officer could acknowledge a trigger by replying to the message that he received so he doesn't have to log in to the Zabbix system first before taking a look into the problem.

Multiple labels in Maps
I would like to add multiple labels to nodes on the maps so I can show the hostname and the ip address or a custom label simultaneously.

SNMP Bulk get
Performance in our network could be greatly improved if Zabbix could fetch al SNMP items on a host in a SNMP bulk request. We have about 5000 open connections continuously on our firewall that separates the monitoring systems from the client systems. This number will increase as more switches and the like will be added to the Zabbix monitoring.

autodiscovery of interfaces via SNMP
Autodiscovery of interfaces with SNMP could be implemented.
After this, the interface numbers could be used to query inoctets, outoctets, inerrors, etc. (template/application based).
This would greatly simplify creating templates for the switch ports we need to monitor. We have switches ranging from the Cisco 6500 series Big-Boys to the small Cisco 2940 desktop switches we all need to monitor.

Possibility of a Screen template to use on a host
I would also be charmed about a screen template that uses items from a template so you can use this screen on any host that uses the template.
This could result in a uniform way of displaying host stats on a per host basis.


I hope you will look into the possibilities concerning my aforementioned "feature requests".

Thanks for the great product!

Regards,

Raymond

[m.lembke]

Hello all,

It would be nice to handle the Host as an entity.

It could have one or more networkinterfaces and one ore more ip addresses.

For example, If you have a multihomed server, and you would like to monitor both sides, you must create two different hosts.

One more feature would be nice to implement.
The discoveryprocess is reale good, but i use actions to autolink my templates to the discovered host.

So if it is possible to give an template some attributes for discoveryinformation like the discovery. It reduces the configuration of
actions for the discoveryprocess.

Multilanguages Trigger, Actions would be nice.

Pie Graphs for displaying disk usage would be nice.



With kind regards

Markus

[mcarbonneaux]

Encryption of data traffic between server and client.
My preffered choice would be to have a shared secret key that is defined in the zabbix agent config file in combination with a preshared key that could be set as a group attribute. Alternatively this might also be set by means of an "application".

yes like is made in bacula backup system (http://www.bacula.org/)

Best Regards,
Mathieu

[marc]

My hopes about HA features for 1.6

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showpost.php?p=26304&postcount=10

Thanks reading it @Alexei and as always... thanks for your great work.
when you ever come to munich, your beer bill is mine

[morfar]

I been using Zabbix for some time now, and its great. But this is my first in this forum though..

Here are my suggestions.

Node classes
I have used templates and all that, which do work fine.
But I have worked with another monitoring system, where all checks (items) was arranged in classes (group of predefined items). So when you put up a new host you simple select which classes should be enabled on the current host. Then each class had predefined items and triggers which automatically was enabled on the host.

Let's say you are about to put up a new server IBM x3550 server, which on the hardware level consist of a raid controller, some disks, CPUs and other stuff. Then you have a set of predefined items and triggers for monitoring the raid controller, and disks etc inside of the class, which you then just enable for this specific hosts, and all the items and triggers get automatically enabled.

The OS is Linux 2.6, so you would also need a Linux 2.6 class, and a class for the distribution like Debian sarge.

On the software level, we are using the server for Postfix, so we would also need a Postfix class, with items monitoring the mail queues, log files and so on.

I hope you get the picture, basically it is "just" putting predefined items and triggers in groups which you can allocate on a host. A bit like templates as it is now, but there should not be a limit of hov many classes that can be enabled on a host, I think it would give more flexibility, and perhaps easier to share classes between users, or the Zabbix developers could make predefined classes for generel items, like server vendors, applications etc.

UI

For the UI i think there is a bit of information overflow.. all I see is a lot of items returning 1 and 0.
I think it would be nice with a alert and warning page, where you could see triggers which are in alert and warning state, and not all the other information about items which is in OK state.

Also on the alert list, it should be possible to put an item or an entire host in "downtime". Let's say you get an alert middle of the night, and the alert is not severe enough for you to spend your night on it, but you would like to pick it up the following day - then you simple put 12 hours of downtime on the item/trigger, and it will be off the alert list. And when the downtime expire it will pop up on the alert list again if the trigger still is true.

API
It would be nice to have some sort of API to call from other applications. So other applications can "login" and check if something is wrong. Or as in my case, I would like to have a public status webpage, for my customers to see if something is not working correctly.

Just my 2 cents, let me know if you want me to elaborate.


Cheers
Morfar

[richlv]

i have listed features we might be interested in pursuing after zabbix 1.6 is released (which is somewhat different topic).
nevertheless, it is connected to 1.6 improvements - if somethnig gets implemented in 1.6, it can be removed from future requirements

i would appreciate any comments at http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?p=26533

[Sjeik]

(...)
It could have one or more networkinterfaces and one ore more ip addresses.
(...)

Exactly! All my servers have multiple IP's, at least two: one WAN IP (firewalled, accessible for everyone) and one VPN IP (not firewalled, port 10050 is accessible through this IP).
The safest way of checking would be using the agent (via the VPN IP) to check local issues and use a WAN connection to test service ports like HTTP, POP and IMAP. This check will implicitly check the firewall configuration (things like port forwarding), which cannot be checked by the local agent.

For this to work, multiple IP's per host should be supported. Furthermore, the user must be able to specify an IP per item. It would be absolutely great if this IP can be overridden using templating:

• Host 'hermes' is connected to template 'Template_Mailservers'.
• Host 'hermes' has three IP addresses configured
• Item 'IMAP server is running' (simple check) is configured inside 'Template_Mailservers'
• The IP-address for item 'IMAP server is running' can be configured separately for host 'Hermes' with a dropdown box with hermes' three IP addresses

I hope this is feasible!

[limo]

SMS interface could be both way, better error processing in alerts

Would be great if 1.6 could have some internal item or trigger for alerting interface.

- Maybe periodicaly check if GSM modem is responding (yes, could be external)
- Same for jabber, email, ...
- Or it can be simple that when alert was not sent, let it put into some internal item.
- If there is error, we could make trigger and send message by another channel
- Incoming sms or jabber messages could be saved into another internal item.
- It would be easy to make trigger, for example, I will send SMS from my mobile phone, saying I want to restart some service. It is up to mi to make trigger and action to do it when sms regexp is ok.
- But it is needed to insert FROM address into this item to be able to authenticate me

I do not know exact way how to make it , but would be great if alerting is both way and we are able to see alert errors and incoming messages somewhere in internal items.

Thanx!
Lukas

[lunix]

My 2 cents

This is probably my first post although i'm using zabbix for a long time, i haven't been around these parts until recently.

I used 1.1 but last week made an upgrade to 1.4.3.
Very good improvements, really excelent new features.

Oh, by the way, on my new setup with postgresql database i came up with a problem with the creation of the database(it seems that someone forgot to remove some backticks from table and or field names) just to discover later in the forum that it was solved on a nightly build but not corrected in the stable version ready for download. That is really *bad*. I just extremelly hate broken *stable* versions.

On my behalf the most wanted feature is proper documentation. Without it the great new features are plain useless. The forum has covered part of that gap but if you use the context help(this was really great if it worked) it just hit's a dead link or even worst: the page for the pdf dowload of the manual that does not contain the proper info. I can provide hosting for the html manual if that's the issue...

I read an interesting post by James Wells and i really support the way he views an open source development community.
Why do i care if i'm not submitting anything? Well, i might just put some effort into zabbix

[andreminelli]

Macros on keys - MSMQ (Message Queues)

I just started using Zabbix into a Windows network using perf_counter keys.

But since we use a lot of message queues from MS and the performance objects have the name of the server on it (for instance, \MSMQ Queue(<myservername>\private$\<myqueuename>)\Messages In Queue]), we can not use templates for these items, and we have to add server by server, queue by queue on Item and Trigger configuration

So will be very usefull if Item keys could accept some macros, so we can write the key like this:
\MSMQ Queue({HOSTNAME}\private$\<myqueuename>)\Messages In Queue]


Thanks