Chapter 2. Distributed Monitoring

Zabbix is a fairly lightweight monitoring application that is able to manage thousands of items with a single-server installation. However, the presence of thousands of monitored hosts, a complex network topology, or the necessity to manage different geographical locations with intermittent, slow, or faulty communications can all show the limits of a single-server configuration. Likewise, the necessity to move beyond a monolithic scenario towards a distributed one is not necessarily a matter of raw performance, and, therefore, it's not just a simple matter of deciding between buying many smaller machines or just one big, powerful one. Many DMZs and network segments with a strict security policy don't allow two-way communication between any hosts on either side, so it is impossible for a Zabbix server to communicate with all the agents on the other side of a firewall. Different branches in the same company or different companies in the same group may need some sort of independence in managing their respective networks, while also needing some coordination and higher-level aggregation of monitored data. Different labs of a research facility may find themselves without a reliable network connection, so they may need to retain monitored data for a while and then send it asynchronously for further processing.

Thanks to its distributed monitoring features, Zabbix can thrive in all these scenarios and provide adequate solutions, whether the problem is about performance, network segregation, administrative independence, or data retention in the presence of faulty links.

While the judicious use of Zabbix agents could be considered from a point of view to be a simple form of distributed monitoring, in this chapter, we will concentrate on Zabbix's supported distributed monitoring mode with proxies. In this chapter, you will learn how to set up, size, and properly configure a Zabbix proxy.

There will also be considerations about security between proxies and the Zabbix server communication so that, by the end of this chapter, you will have all the information you need to apply Zabbix's distributed features to your environment.