Zabbix is an opensource monitoring tool that has been rapidly evolving during the last few years. We will talk about the growth of the product and look at it from several perspectives : technical – how Zabbix has developed functionally, important decisions made project management – which processes help to improve the software quality and which ones help less community – how open is Zabbix and how that has changed over the years both towards more and less openness The talk will illustrate points made with examples from the Zabbix community as well as from an extensive Zabbix use at Nokia.

1. Zabbix Keeps on Improving
An Outside Look

2. Who am I?
Worked at Zabbix for some wonderful time
Two books on Zabbix
Writing articles on www.zabbixbook.com
OpenStreetMap mapper

3. Disclaimer
Not with the Zabbix company anymore
Not affiliated with Zabbix in any way
Still using Zabbix

4. Agenda today
What's new in Zabbix (2 years)
Community or secrecy -
what's the future of Zabbix?

5. What's New in Zabbix
A Story With a Lot in It

6. What happened in 2 years?
Zabbix covered at OSMC in 2015 (2 years ago)
Since then, 3.2 and 3.4 released
Major releases – lots of new features

7. LTS
Long Term Support – a new concept for Zabbix
Every 3rd release is LTS, supported for 5 years
Non-LTS supported until the next release

8. One, two, LTS

9. More detail:
https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy

10. General functionality
Agentless
Native agent
Visualisation
Alerting
Data storage
Web monitoring

12. Major UI improvements - dashboard
Much more flexible dashboards
Multiple dashboards
Dashboard sharing

14. Major UI improvements - maps
PNG -> SVG, custom shapes, copypaste...

15. Map navigation tree

16. Value preprocessing - before
Delta value (absolute and per second)
Custom multiplier (bytes to bits etc)
Hex -> decimal and similar conversions

17. Value preprocessing - new
Regular expressions
XML XPath
JSON Path (limited)

18. Value preprocessing - regexp
Previously available for log monitoring
Now expanded to any item type
Possibilities:
● cut off " °C" from bad SNMP devices
● extract data from Apache, HAProxy status page
Original value:
33 °C
Regexp parsing:
([0-9]+), 1
Value:
33

19. Value preprocessing – XPath, JSON path
Extract values from XML, JSON
Status pages, API output...

20. Double the power – master items
Master item – collected once:
{"status":
{"users":
{"online": 13},
{"blocked": 3}
}
}
Dependent item - JSON path:
$.status.users.online
Value:
13
Dependent item - JSON path:
$.status.users.blocked
Value:
3

21. Extract for displaying purposes
41904:20171112:042106.873 [Z3005] query failed: [2006]
MySQL server has gone away [begin;]
Extract the value
{{ITEM.VALUE}.regsub("(.*[[0-9]+] )(.*)[.*", Error: 2)}
Displayed or sent in the alert
(stored value not changed)
Error: MySQL server has gone away

22. Polling frequency
Before – seconds only
Now – time suffixes (5m, 2h etc)
LLD/user macros supported
● Custom frequency based on discovery
● Custom frequency based on variables

23. Same template, easy dependencies
Core router – pinged every 10 seconds
Edge router – pinged every 30 seconds
Printer – pinged every 60 seconds

24. Host-item-trigger-event
Host
Item
collects data
Trigger
checks item data
Event
generated by trigger
(PROBLEM/OK)

25. Event tags
Host
Item
collects data
Trigger
checks item data
Event
generated by trigger
(PROBLEM/OK)
Tag = value
Tag = value

26. Trigger per app or common
Application Sugar stopped
Application Honey_Honey stopped
Application Sugar started
Application Honey_Honey started
Alert
Nothing
Resolve
Nothing

27. Correlate by tags
Application Sugar stopped
Application Honey_Honey stopped
Application Sugar started
Application Honey_Honey started
Application=Sugar -> Problem
Application=Honey_Honey -> Problem
Application=Sugar -> Resolve
Application=Honey_Honey -> Resolve

28. Dependencies on steroids

29. Problem handling, acknowledging
Manually resolve any problem
● New problem values would alert gain
Alert upon acknowledgement
● Including remote commands

30. JMX
Configurable JMX endpoint
● RMI only previously – JBoss, Weblogic trouble
Low level discovery for JMX
● Discover JMX beans/attributes

31. Remote environments

32. Zabbix proxy – active/passive
Zabbix proxy

33. Remote commands
Data
sudo systemctl restart this

34. Previously...
Zabbix proxy
DataData
sudo systemctl restart this

35. Previously...
Zabbix proxy
DataData
sudo systemctl restart this

36. Zabbix proxy – active/passive
Zabbix proxy
DataData
sudo systemctl restart this sudo systemctl ...

37. Nested hostgroups
Europe/Latvia/Riga, Production/DB/MySQL
● aggregate checks
● action conditions
● action operations
● correlation conditions
● host maintenance
● global scripts

38. Busy logfiles
log and logrt got new friends
log.count and logrt.count gather count of lines
...on the agent side

39. VMware monitoring
New items
● vmware.hv.datacenter.name
● vmware.vm.datacenter.name
● vmware.hv.sensor.health.state
● vmware.hv.datastore.size
Performance improvements

40. Feature parity
ERE -> PCRE for daemons
Web scenario XML export/import
count() by regexp

41. Validation, maintenance
Shows investment in non-shiny things
Makes the product easier to use and maintain
Important

42. Less rakes
Cannot delete users, used in alerting
Additional protocol validation, less connections
Improved error messages all around

43. Resilience
Auto-reg events generated as needed
Misc events kept for less
Follows resolv.conf changes

44. Moar rezilience
More data logged in agent crashes
One process to query IPMI
Parallel alerting - no blocking, faster spamming
Alert on broken items missing data

45. New filtering in the GUI
● host groups
● templates
● global scripts
● maintenance periods
● actions
● network discovery rules
● proxies
● user groups
● users
● media types

46. Upgrade process
Easy – start the server
7344:20170630:183622.330 current database version (mandatory/optional):
7344:20170630:183622.330 required mandatory version: 03000000
7344:20170630:183622.330 starting automatic database upgrade
7344:20170630:183622.335 completed 0% of database upgrade
7344:20170630:183622.372 completed 1% of database upgrade
...
7344:20170630:183623.698 completed 99% of database upgrade
7344:20170630:183623.698 completed 100% of database upgrade
7344:20170630:183623.698 database upgrade fully completed

47. What's often overlooked?
Possibly one of the best docs

48. Zabbix 4.0
Planned for 2018 Q1 (February)
Roadmap not published anymore :(

49. How Open is Zabbix?
The Devil is in the Details

50. Let's be open here
Open code, closed development
● Patches not accepted (often for a good reason)
Community not engaged
Zabbix closing up?

51. Specifications disappeared
Specifications freely shared before
Closed later
What happened?

52. Specs are gone with the wind
One reason given – no feedback
One reason given – too much feedback
Specs advertised to support customers

53. Can Zabbix do this?
Of course – nobody can demand openness
Looking for more funds
The forever-opensource-promise not legally
binding

54. "Bad" examples – open core
Puppet
Elastic [search, Logstash, Kibana...]

55. Bad^WGood example
Ansible – Tower opensourced as AWX
https://www.ansible.com/awx-project-faq

56. Memberberries
Remember syslog-ng?
Rising star, but open core -> mid-term gain
Rsyslog took over

57. Why worry?
Can Zabbix be the universal solution?
Users, platform vendors might defect
Zabbix is great – maybe code drops are enough

58. Zabbix is a great choice
Zabbix is Free software and has:
● Great functionality
● Awesome team
● Wonderful community
Open
Core

59. Let's get in touch
IRC – #zabbix on Freenode
Contact form – http://www.zabbixbook.com/about/
Conference – ask me pointed questions
Question time