Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two

Hack #85. Monitor Service Availability with Zabbix

It's nice to have some warning before those help calls come flooding in. Be the first to know what's happening with critical servers on your network!

It will happen to everyone sooner or later: you'll be minding your own business, blissfully unaware that the network is crashing to its knees until a secretary claims that the Internet is down. By that time, the bosses have all noticed, and everyone wants answers. Full-blown panic kicks in, and you race around the office, pinging things at random to try to figure out what's happening. Wouldn't it be nice if you had some sort of detailed real-time network map that could monitor services and tell you what was going on? Zabbix to the rescue! Zabbix is a host monitoring tool that can do amazing things. Read on to see how you can apply it in your own network.

Dependencies

Zabbix is a complicated beast, so there are naturally a few dependencies to note before you rush headlong into the installation. Zabbix is written in PHP, so make sure you have a relatively recent version installed. If you haven't upgraded in a while, this might be the time to do so. Since Zabbix is completely web-based, you'll obviously need a web server as well. Par for the course, Apache or Apache2 is the recommended server of choice. Make sure when you install Apache that you configure it with mod-php enabled as well. This ensures that Apache can understand the embedded PHP that makes Zabbix what it is. Then, make sure ...