Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep dive. Okay, imagine your IT infrastructure.
Speaker 1: It's like this huge intricate machine, right, thousands of moving parts.
Speaker 1: How do you actually keep it running smoothly? How do
Speaker 1: you predict problems before they hit and cut through all
Speaker 1: that noise, all that data to find what really matters?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the million dollar question in IT. Isn't it
Speaker 2: systems just keep getting more complex and finding those essential
Speaker 2: insights doing it efficiently reliably? Oh, that's what every team.
Speaker 1: Is chasing, absolutely, and that chase is exactly why we're
Speaker 1: diving deep today. We're looking at the ZABIC seven IT
Speaker 1: Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook by Nathan Lifting and Brian van Beekl.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just some minor update ZABC seven point ZERLTS.
Speaker 1: That's long term support. It brings some really significant quality
Speaker 1: of life improvements, plus some cutting edge features building on
Speaker 1: what we saw in six point two and six point four.
Speaker 2: Right. And what's great about this book, I think, is
Speaker 2: how the authors, who are really respected in the Zavik's world,
Speaker 2: have made it so practical. It genuinely bridges that gap
Speaker 2: between the official docs, which can be a bit dry,
Speaker 2: and the real world problems you actually face day to day.
Speaker 2: Even Alexei's Ladyshev, the guy who created Zadex, points out
Speaker 2: their deep knowledge and hands on experience in the forward.
Speaker 2: It really is a cookbook, giving you specific recipes, specific techniques.
Speaker 1: Okay, so our mission today is pretty straightforward. We're giving
Speaker 1: you a shortcut. We're pulling out the most important stuff
Speaker 1: from this book, helping you get up to speed fast
Speaker 1: on what Zavic seven can do. We'll focus on what's critical,
Speaker 1: what's maybe a bit surprising, and why it actually matters
Speaker 1: for you when you're designing, building or maintaining your Zavik setup. Right, then,
Speaker 1: let's untack this starting at the beginning, the core bits
Speaker 1: of Zavik seven. You've got the Zavic server that's the engine,
Speaker 1: the brain's doing all the work. And then there's the
Speaker 1: front end that's your UI, how you see and interact
Speaker 1: with everything exactly.
Speaker 2: And for that front end piece, the book really pushes
Speaker 2: NGINX over APATCHE. The main reason speed GNX is generally
Speaker 2: quite a bit faster, and that really makes a difference
Speaker 2: when you've got lots of people hitting the interface all day. Oh.
Speaker 2: In a handtip for getting started, ZABX actually provides really
Speaker 2: good setup guides and repo links right on their site,
Speaker 2: makes that initial install surprisingly smooth.
Speaker 1: Okay, speed and easy setup are gray, But what about reliability?
Speaker 1: Making sure zabex itself doesn't fall over. High availability or
Speaker 1: HHA for the server seems absolutely key for anyone serious
Speaker 1: about monitoring. That was a big deal back in ZABC six, right,
Speaker 1: and it's still vital in seven. It's all about keeping
Speaker 1: your monitoring up even if one server has a problem.
Speaker 2: Totally crucial. The idea is basically a split setup. You
Speaker 2: keep your database and server node separate. Then you use
Speaker 2: a virtual IP of VIP for the cluster nodes, so
Speaker 2: if one server node fails, the other just takes over
Speaker 2: seamless failover. It really takes Zavik's reliability to the next level,
Speaker 2: minimizes those outages, and the book even mentions thinking about
Speaker 2: HA for the database too, maybe like a mycycle master
Speaker 2: master setup for you know, ultimate peace of mind.
Speaker 1: So foundation solid, it's reliable. Next big thing security and
Speaker 1: user management. Got to make sure the right people see
Speaker 1: the right things. How does Zabix seven handle mastering users
Speaker 1: in security?
Speaker 2: It's got a pretty structured approach, using user groups and
Speaker 2: user roles. Think of user groups for controlling what people
Speaker 2: can monitor, like permissions for specific host groups. User roles
Speaker 2: control how they interact with zabex their UI access. So
Speaker 2: you could have say a user plus role for folks
Speaker 2: who just need to read only access but maybe need
Speaker 2: to see specific reports more.
Speaker 1: Is this basic stuff that granularity sounds essential? Okay? Now,
Speaker 1: something that sounds like a huge time saver, especially for
Speaker 1: bigger places, advanced authentication and this just in time provisioning
Speaker 1: JT right. Lots of companies use external off like SAMO
Speaker 1: security search and markup language, or LDA lightweight directory access
Speaker 1: protocol things like azured open Lda exactly.
Speaker 2: And this is where zabox gets really smart. GIT user provisioning.
Speaker 2: It came in six point four better now in seven
Speaker 2: automatically creates users in zadas and it gives them the
Speaker 2: right permissions based on their info from your ldapp or
Speaker 2: SAMILL server. Think about the time that saves, no more
Speaker 2: manual setup for every new person. It's a massive workflow boost.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it works with the identity providers like Octa
Speaker 2: one log in basically anything that speaks SAMI well. The
Speaker 2: book also mentions API tokens quickly for scripting and integration.
Speaker 2: Important point, there always limit permissions for API users in production.
Speaker 1: Security first, okay, zabx is running. Users are managed securely.
Speaker 1: Now the core job, how do we actually monitor stuff?
Speaker 1: Zabix seven has a whole bunch of ways to do this.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the classic, the Zavix agent right.
Speaker 2: The agent two main modes, passive and active. Passive means
Speaker 2: the server asks the agent for data. Active means the
Speaker 2: agent collects data and sends it to the server. The
Speaker 2: key thing. Active mode is often way more efficient. It
Speaker 2: pushes the load out to the agents. You can use
Speaker 2: both at the same time, which gives you flexibility. Plus,
Speaker 2: Zavix Agent two adds even more capability, especially for certain
Speaker 2: apps and.
Speaker 1: For network gear. SNMP's been around forever, but I hear
Speaker 1: the old way of polling has had a bit of
Speaker 1: an overhaul.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the old way still works fine, but since Zabik
Speaker 2: six point four there's a much better approach. Zavix can
Speaker 2: now use SMMP key bulk queries using the walk item key.
Speaker 2: It's way more efficient, puts less strain on your network devices.
Speaker 2: You get more data with less impact. Oh and a
Speaker 2: big plus and seven point zero asynchronous polling for Agent
Speaker 2: HGDP SNMP means Zavix can run tons of checks at
Speaker 2: the same time per polar process way more scalable. We
Speaker 2: still use OIDs object identifiers like addresses for metrics like
Speaker 2: one point three point one point one point one point
Speaker 2: two zeros ever two one point four for memory.
Speaker 1: Stuff for instance, okay, Agent's sm MP. What about more
Speaker 1: specialized things checking specific services, apps, databases?
Speaker 2: Zaviks has loads of options there. You've got simple checks
Speaker 2: just as an SSH port open stuff like that. Then
Speaker 2: there's the Zavix Trapper, which you use as Zavic sender.
Speaker 2: Great for customs. Script sending data in calculated independent items
Speaker 2: are cool too. You can create new metrics from existing ones,
Speaker 2: like average memory use over an hour or pulling one
Speaker 2: specific value out of a bigger chunk of data. For
Speaker 2: Java apps, there's built in JMX monitoring, perfect for things
Speaker 2: like Tomcat. You can even run the Java Gateway bit
Speaker 2: on a separate machine if you need to scale it.
Speaker 2: Database monitoring uses odp VC open database connectivity, so you
Speaker 2: can basically monitor any database that supports it. Just watch
Speaker 2: performance sometimes. Agent two also does native monitoring for some
Speaker 2: dbs and the HTTP agent lets you monitor websites or
Speaker 2: APIs directly grab data from adjasent endpoint, track a version number,
Speaker 2: whatever you need.
Speaker 1: All right, now for something that sounds really new and
Speaker 1: potentially game changing in ZABI seven these browser items. What's
Speaker 1: the deal there?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is really cool. It's brand new and
Speaker 2: zabq seven Basically, it lets you simulate a real user
Speaker 2: interacting with a web application. I think navigating pages, clicking buttons,
Speaker 2: filling out forms, all automated using JavaScript and Selenium. Why
Speaker 2: is it so powerful? Well, it opens up like endless
Speaker 2: possibilities for monitoring the actual end user experience. You can
Speaker 2: measure things like logging times, or grab specific data from
Speaker 2: a rendered web page that a simple HTTP check could
Speaker 2: never see because it doesn't run JavaScript.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, that sounds incredibly useful. Can you give like
Speaker 1: a practical exam?
Speaker 2: Sure? Imagine setting up a browser item that logs into
Speaker 2: your web app, clicks through to say reports than system information,
Speaker 2: and then it grabs values right off that page, maybe
Speaker 2: required server performance or number of active hosts, stuff like that.
Speaker 2: It gives you insight you just couldn't get before. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then to make sense of that raw data, you extract.
Speaker 2: You use Zabas's pre processing that lets you clean up
Speaker 2: or transform the data before it's stored, like using a
Speaker 2: rejex to pull out just the number of bytes received
Speaker 2: from network interface output. It turns raw data into useful
Speaker 2: metrics you can actually grasp.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're collecting all this amazing data. Browser data included.
Speaker 1: Next up making sure we get alerted smartly triggers and
Speaker 1: effective notifications. That's key, right, and I hear for people
Speaker 1: used to older Zavix, say five point two or before
Speaker 1: the trigger syntax change quite a bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a really important point since Saba's five point four.
Speaker 2: The syntax is quite different. It's much more cohesive now.
Speaker 2: It starts with the function name than the host or
Speaker 2: template and brackets and uses forward slashes. It's way clearer
Speaker 2: than the old style with colon's and dots, which could
Speaker 2: get confusing, especially when item keys also add dots in them.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, and beyond just syntax, are there some more
Speaker 1: advanced trigger functions now that let you do smarter analysis?
Speaker 2: Definitely? There are functions like trendo X. This one uses
Speaker 2: trend data that's the hourly average MEN or max instead
Speaker 2: of just raw history data points, so is better for
Speaker 2: longer term analysis, like looking at average memory use over
Speaker 2: a whole week, ignoring little spikes. Then there's time left.
Speaker 2: This is really cool. It's predictive. Zabix can actually predict
Speaker 2: when a metric like disk space is going to hit
Speaker 2: a critical threshold, say predictably full within seven days. Gives
Speaker 2: you time to react before it happens, and you could
Speaker 2: do time shifting to compare current values to past ones
Speaker 2: as things like is memory twenty percent lower now than
Speaker 2: last week? It can get complex, but it's super powerful
Speaker 2: for spawning trends.
Speaker 1: Okay, powerful triggers, but the goal is useful alerts, not
Speaker 1: just noise. Right, how do you stop getting spammed?
Speaker 2: It's exactly It's about informing, not overwhelming. First you said
Speaker 2: up actions like notify zabx admins. Then you pick your
Speaker 2: media types email, slack teams, telegram, ops, genie, whatever you use.
Speaker 2: The really crucial part is customizing the messages. Keep trigger
Speaker 2: names clear and short, don't stuff macros in the name itself.
Speaker 2: Then customize the message templates for each media type or
Speaker 2: action so you only get the info you actually need
Speaker 2: to act on. It means you need to plan your trigger.
Speaker 2: Structures and tagging tags became important in ZABK six. Carefully
Speaker 2: to keep everything organized and effective.
Speaker 1: Right, collect the data, get smart alerts now making it
Speaker 1: all visually clear. Visualization ZABAK seems pretty strong here. Starting
Speaker 1: with basic graphs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, graphs are your bread and butter for showing single
Speaker 2: item values over time, uptime, CPU, network, traffic, you name it.
Speaker 2: Quick tip, think about colorblind friendly colors. Make them usable
Speaker 2: for everyone. Beyond graphs, you've got maps. These are great
Speaker 2: for showing how devices connect. And here's a neat trick.
Speaker 2: Map labels can show live data like traffic stats and
Speaker 2: link colors can change based on trigger, so link goes
Speaker 2: red if it's down. You could even set a trigger
Speaker 2: for high usage, maybe to spot a d DAS attack early.
Speaker 1: And for pulling everything together that big picture of view.
Speaker 1: Dashboards are the way to go.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, dashboards are perfect for consolidating everything you need
Speaker 2: for troubleshooting, for daily checks for those big TV screens.
Speaker 2: In the NOC, ZABK seven point zero really doubled down
Speaker 2: on visualization, adding lots of new widgets. You've got widget
Speaker 2: for problems, maps, grafts, specific item values, gauges, pie charts,
Speaker 2: loads of options. You can even have multiple pages in
Speaker 2: one dashboard, like an overview page and then a detailed
Speaker 2: host data page. And speaking of overviews, zabs can automatically
Speaker 2: pull inventory data, hardware, software versions, serial numbers. Keeps your
Speaker 2: asset list up to date automatically, which leads to another
Speaker 2: cool visualization, the geomap widget. It puts your hosts on
Speaker 2: a world map showing their status using the latitude longitude
Speaker 2: from inventory. Pretty neat addition to your dashboard.
Speaker 1: And what about reporting keeping track of the Zabic system
Speaker 1: itself and getting regular summaries out?
Speaker 2: Yeah, good point. There's a system information report to quickly
Speaker 2: check Zavic's own health. The audit log is crucial at
Speaker 2: tracks who changed what in Zab's essential for accountability, and
Speaker 2: the action log shows if your alert notifications actually went
Speaker 2: out successfully. A really popular feature since five point four
Speaker 2: actually is scheduled pdf reports. Zabax can take snapshot images
Speaker 2: of any dashboard you've built and email it out as
Speaker 2: a PDF on a schedule. Super flexible because any cool
Speaker 2: new widget they add you can immediately include in your
Speaker 2: PDF reports.
Speaker 1: Okay, shifting gears a bit, large environments, dynamic systems automation
Speaker 1: and scalability become absolutely critical. How does ZABK seven help there?
Speaker 1: Starting with automatically adding new.
Speaker 2: Hosts right, this is a huge strength. Zabx has several
Speaker 2: ways to do discovery. Network discovery. Let ZABK scan ranges
Speaker 2: for new devices using agent checks or SNMP It can
Speaker 2: find hosts based on names, services, SNNP results and automatically
Speaker 2: add them with the right templates and groups. Then there's
Speaker 2: active agent audit registration. This is even more automatic. The
Speaker 2: agent basically introduces itself to Zavix, maybe sending some metad data,
Speaker 2: and Zavix adds it based on rules you set super
Speaker 2: smooth for deploying lots of agents, and you've got low
Speaker 2: level discovery LLD. That's for discovering specific things on a host,
Speaker 2: like when does performance counters or JMX objects in Java apps,
Speaker 2: It finds them and creates the monitoring items automatically. For
Speaker 2: sn mpld again, that efficient walk key is used. Grab
Speaker 2: bulk data, then use preprocessing to chop it up into
Speaker 2: individual items.
Speaker 1: That sounds powerful. Now you mentioned something about using custom
Speaker 1: Jason with LED that sounds incredibly flexible.
Speaker 2: It really is. This shows just how extensible ZABS can be.
Speaker 2: You could have an external script, maybe running as a
Speaker 2: cron job, generate a JSON file with host info, send
Speaker 2: that Jason to Zavix using zabxender, then configure led rules
Speaker 2: in Zavix to read that Jason and automatically creator update
Speaker 2: hosts and interfaces based on it. It's perfect for integrating
Speaker 2: with external inventory systems or cndbs. But when you're talking
Speaker 2: true scale, especially across networks, Zavix proxies are essential proxy's right.
Speaker 1: They collect data locally and forward it, reducing load on
Speaker 1: the main server. I hear they've got some major reliability
Speaker 1: upgrades too, huge upgrades.
Speaker 2: Proxies themselves collect data remotely, taking load off the central server.
Speaker 2: Can be passive or active. But the big news is
Speaker 2: proxy high availability and load balancing. Now you can have
Speaker 2: a group of proxies working together. They share the load
Speaker 2: of monitoring hosts in that location, and if one proxy fails,
Speaker 2: the others pick up its workload. For big distributed setups,
Speaker 2: this is a massive improvement. Makes Zavix truly enterprise ready
Speaker 2: and highly reliable.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've got this potentially huge, automated, scaled out
Speaker 1: Zavix setup. How do we maintain it? And keep it secure.
Speaker 1: Let's talk maintenance periods. First.
Speaker 2: Essential for planned work, you set up windows in the
Speaker 2: front end, say every Sunday morning, to stop alerts firing
Speaker 2: while you're doing updates. Zavic seven made these much faster
Speaker 2: to take effect near instant. They call it because they
Speaker 2: can pig cash reloads quicker. You can choose with data collection,
Speaker 2: which just suppresses alerts, or no data collection, which stops
Speaker 2: everything for that host during maintenance and for upgrades. The
Speaker 2: book hammers this back up. First read the release notes carefully.
Speaker 2: A key thing for Zavic seven is you must upgrade
Speaker 2: the underlying stack. Two PHP needs to be eight point
Speaker 2: two or eight point three plus normi dB needs to
Speaker 2: be eleven point four plus dep That catches people out.
Speaker 2: So the cookbook really helps there and.
Speaker 1: Keeping it running smoothly. Performance tuning. What are the common bottlenecks?
Speaker 2: Well, you might see Zavis complaining about discoverer processes too busy.
Speaker 2: You can usually fix that by tweaking the number of
Speaker 2: discoverer processes in the server config file. More processes help
Speaker 2: distribute the work, but you're limited by server resources. Obviously,
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's just a bag and fig causing the bottleneck. Though,
Speaker 2: the Zavix Housekeeper, which cleans up old data, also needs tuning.
Speaker 2: Adjusting how often it runs and how much it deletes
Speaker 2: per run is important, but the best settings really depend
Speaker 2: on your specific setup, how much data you collect and
Speaker 2: keep for the database itself, specifically Micequel, the book recommends
Speaker 2: a tool called mice call Tuner dot pl. It's an
Speaker 2: open source script that analyzes your dB and suggests can
Speaker 2: fig changes. But, and this is important, don't just blindly
Speaker 2: apply it suggestions. Always research what each parameter does and
Speaker 2: understand the implications before changing anything.
Speaker 1: And for really big databases where even tuning the Housekeeper
Speaker 1: isn't enough.
Speaker 2: Right for huge amounts of history and trend data, you
Speaker 2: need more advanced techniques. With my sequel, you can use
Speaker 2: database partitioning. Zabx supports this. Instead of deleting old data
Speaker 2: row by row, which is slow, you just drop entire
Speaker 2: old partitions, much much faster for housekeeping. If you're using postcresscool,
Speaker 2: zabx supports the timescale DT extension. It's specifically designed for
Speaker 2: time series data like zadex generates, and it can give
Speaker 2: significant performance boosts on large databases. But beyond performance, security
Speaker 2: is critical, especially for the database connection. You absolutely should
Speaker 2: encrypt the communication between the Zaba server, the front end,
Speaker 2: and the database using SSLTLS certificates like from open SSL.
Speaker 2: It adds a vital security layer protecting against data snooping
Speaker 2: on the network. It's a bit complex to set up
Speaker 2: certificates configs, but essential for production. The book notes that
Speaker 2: pretty much all Zavix communication can be encrypted except for
Speaker 2: the direct link between the server and front end WebUI itself.
Speaker 1: Okay, last big area. Zabx isn't just for on premise
Speaker 1: servers anymore, right, How does it handle cloud stuff in
Speaker 1: extending beyond basic monitoring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very much cloud aware. Now you can monitor
Speaker 2: AWS and Azure directly. For AWS, you typically use HTTP
Speaker 2: agents with some JavaScript to call awsapis like cloud Watch.
Speaker 2: You can discover and monitor EC two instances, RDS, databases,
Speaker 2: S three buckets, lots more. Same idea. For Azure, use
Speaker 2: API calls to discover and monitor Azure resources Cosmos, dbseql, VMS,
Speaker 2: et cetera. The key thing is these templates and scripts
Speaker 2: are just starting points. You can extend them to grab
Speaker 2: basically any metric available via the cloud provider's API. Oh
Speaker 2: and doctor monitoring is much simpler now too, Using built
Speaker 2: in zabx agent two plugins pretty much works out of
Speaker 2: the box.
Speaker 1: And what if you want to integrate zabex even more
Speaker 1: deeply custom scripts interacting with the API.
Speaker 2: The ZAVIXAP is your friend here. It's really powerful. You
Speaker 2: can script interactions using Python, PowerShell, whatever you like. The
Speaker 2: book gives a great practical example using a Python script
Speaker 2: to queratey the ZAVISAPI for host names and ips. Then
Speaker 2: the script automatically updates the echo's file on a central
Speaker 2: jump post so you can easily SSH to any monitored
Speaker 2: machine by name Superrandy. Another cool API example a script
Speaker 2: that lets you enable or disable monitoring for a host
Speaker 2: directly by clicking on it in a zabs map Interactive
Speaker 2: control and you often find scripts like these shared in
Speaker 2: the Zavix community. It's a very active open source project,
Speaker 2: so it's worth exploring what others have built.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, that was quite the journey through ZABK seven
Speaker 1: from the core bits user management, all those monitoring methods
Speaker 1: through browser items, smart alert's visualization, automation, scaling, maintenance, security,
Speaker 1: cloud covered a lot. This cookbook really does seem packed
Speaker 1: with practical advice, and hopefully this deep dive gives you
Speaker 1: a solid handle on building robust, insightful monitoring.
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah, you should now have a really good feel
Speaker 2: for what zabk seven offers, whether you're just starting out
Speaker 2: or looking to get more out of your existing setup.
Speaker 2: It's a seriously capable platform, it.
Speaker 1: Really seems like it. In a world just drowning in data.
Speaker 1: ZABK seven gives you the tools not just to collect it,
Speaker 1: but to actually understand it, build a story about your
Speaker 1: infrastructure's health, predict problems, maybe even control things directly. So
Speaker 1: the question for you is what hidden stories are waiting
Speaker 1: in your data and how can zabik seven help you
Speaker 1: write a better ending for your system