Chapter 2. Zabbix and I – Almost Heroes

Ever since I started working with IT infrastructure, I have been noticing that almost every company, when they start thinking about a monitoring tool, think of trying to know in some way when the system or service will go down before it actually happens. They expect the monitoring tool to create some kind of alert when something is broken. But by this approach, the system administrator will know about an error or system outage only after the error occurs (and maybe, at the same time, users are trying to use those systems).

We need a monitoring solution to help us predict system outages and any other situation that our services can be affected by. Our approach with monitoring tools should cover not only our system monitoring but also our business monitoring.

Nowadays, any company (small, medium, or large) has some dependency on technologies, from servers and network assets to IP equipment with a lower environmental impact. Maybe you need security cameras, thermometers, UPS, access control devices, or any other IP device by which you can gather some useful data. What about applications and services? What about data integration or transactions? What about user experience? What about a supplier website or system that you depend on?

We should realize that monitoring things is not restricted to IT infrastructure, and it can be extended to other areas and business levels as well.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Zabbix—the initial steps
• The natural growth
• Beyond infrastructure
• The Internet of Things wave
• Everyone knows about Zabbix
• Things we never thought about
• Talking about performance