Zabbix conference 2017: how was the first day
The 7th annual Zabbix conference in Riga has again gathered a record number of participants!
More than 250 people came from 32 countries: system and network engineers, cloud specialists, DevOps experts, integrators, analysts and just technical directors.
It was 2 days filled with unexpected ideas, vivid examples, news from the Zabbix team and the revelations of people who knew all the intricacies of using Zabbix in monitoring.
What happened on the 1st day?
By tradition, the conference was opened by Alexey Vladyshev, telling about the statistics of the conference participants, the latest Zabbix achievements and the product news expected in the near future. It mainly focused on event correlation, IT services, Zabbix performance improvements, box templates, and product update release policies.
What country do you think is in first place in the number of conference participants this year? Look for the answer in the presentation too!
SAS is still using Zabbix 2.2 and is still happy. 1000 hosts, 30 proxies, 1100 users.
Tips for improving Zabbix performance:
Integration with LDAP is done through the Zabbix API. Services are checked through synthetic transactions.
Zabbix is integrated with:
Downloadable modules written:
Developers usually do not want to set up monitoring, and maintenance specialists do not have time to study the details of the internal structure of applications. But they need to find a common language, build a system that helps to interact effectively. And here a lot depends on the automation of this process.
Rafael Martinez Guerrero talks about the DevOps environment at the University of Oslo, where Zabbix plays an important role with Nivlheim and CFengine in solving Inventory and Configuration management tasks.
A vivid overview of the most interesting Zabbix 3.4 chips from Ingus Vilnis, Team Leader. The presentation is full of concrete examples of using new features and describing the benefits of the transition to Zabbix 3.4
Andrew Nelson talked about how Ansible can help use Zabbix in configuration management and agent deployment.
And also information about Ansible Tower: how to further simplify the use of Ansible with Zabbix (see github.com/ansible/awx for the source version on github )
Vladimir began with a brief overview of modern cloud technologies for dummies. Next is how to deploy Zabbix in the clouds. What architecture is suitable for this? What options are generally possible? Vladimir's speech is filled with useful tips on these topics.
What makes big telecoms move away from traditional commercial monitoring solutions?
First of all, this is the price of a license. Or a “license prison” as aptly defined by Gabriel Farkas of Orange Slovensko.
What helped him choose Zabbix among other open source solutions? Gossip! ;) And the versatile experience of his partner from Slovakia.
Strengths Zabbix considers Fault managemant, Performance management, SLA, Inventory, web-monitoring and a number of other things.
See the presentation for details on how Orange Slovensko planned the migration to Zabbix, how it went, and what they will do next.
Chris McKenna provides another example of how well-known enterprises benefit from open source solutions such as Zabbix.
The presentation tells the story of how IT Managed Solutions built a powerful and efficient monitoring solution based on Zabbix using Grafana, Victor Ops and ServiceNow.
An experienced Zabbix user, system analyst at Rietumu Bank Konstantin Oshmyan, spoke about why the bank chose Zabbix to monitor IBM AS / 400 and other IBM solutions. While earlier, IBM Tivoli was used for monitoring.
Among the main reasons: the simplicity of Zabbix, SLA management, friendly technical support.
Since there was no off-the-shelf Zabbix agent under AS / 400, Konstantin developed his own agent emulator that runs on the Zabbix agent protocol.
You can download it here: share.zabbix.com
Quadrata employees told the story of the successful use of Zabbix for monitoring large-scale IT infrastructure using the example of a leading Italian bank. The presentation contains a number of details of the solution for monitoring the Veritas cluster using Zabbix and how the Zabbix API is used to build custom dashboard.
Patrick (Patrik Uytterhoeven) spoke about the experience of process automation in Zabbix and the problems overcome in this way.
In the presentation, details of choosing hardware, software settings, using Smart templates, scripts for automation, Grafana, LLD (which appeared in Zabbix, including as a result of their order).
A decent result - this is how the data element update queue now looks:
Everyone needs a good monitoring solution. Especially if you are one of the world leaders in luxury online retail!
Andrea and Enrico, two expressive Italian admins responsible for monitoring at the Yoox Net-A-Porter Group (luxury fashion), talked about how they use Zabbix, deployed on AWS.
Although the slides convey only part of their emotional performance, they also contain many useful details on how to build monitoring in the cloud.
What happened on day 2 - read on our next blog!
All the presentations mentioned above can be viewed here . Videos will be coming soon!
PS The article is also available in English on our blog .
More than 250 people came from 32 countries: system and network engineers, cloud specialists, DevOps experts, integrators, analysts and just technical directors.
It was 2 days filled with unexpected ideas, vivid examples, news from the Zabbix team and the revelations of people who knew all the intricacies of using Zabbix in monitoring.
What happened on the 1st day?
Opening address by Alexey Vladyshev, Director and Founder of Zabbix
By tradition, the conference was opened by Alexey Vladyshev, telling about the statistics of the conference participants, the latest Zabbix achievements and the product news expected in the near future. It mainly focused on event correlation, IT services, Zabbix performance improvements, box templates, and product update release policies.
What country do you think is in first place in the number of conference participants this year? Look for the answer in the presentation too!
Steven Bush on SAS using Zabbix
SAS is still using Zabbix 2.2 and is still happy. 1000 hosts, 30 proxies, 1100 users.
Tips for improving Zabbix performance:
- Frontend:
Use Nginx instead of Apache - Backend:
Offload data collection with proxy - Database:
Use pgbouncer for Postgres to reduce the number of connections to the database server. But the company is going to migrate to Oracle, as the company itself has more Oracle DBA specialists.
Continuous backup (live data stream)
Integration with LDAP is done through the Zabbix API. Services are checked through synthetic transactions.
Zabbix is integrated with:
- Jira
- Amazon web services
- and etc.
Downloadable modules written:
- Agency modules for collecting internal SAS metrics
- License Verification Module
Using Zabbix in DevOps at the University of Oslo, Rafael Martinez Guerro
Developers usually do not want to set up monitoring, and maintenance specialists do not have time to study the details of the internal structure of applications. But they need to find a common language, build a system that helps to interact effectively. And here a lot depends on the automation of this process.
Rafael Martinez Guerrero talks about the DevOps environment at the University of Oslo, where Zabbix plays an important role with Nivlheim and CFengine in solving Inventory and Configuration management tasks.
Ingus Vilnis: For those who are not yet aware of what's new in Zabbix 3.4
A vivid overview of the most interesting Zabbix 3.4 chips from Ingus Vilnis, Team Leader. The presentation is full of concrete examples of using new features and describing the benefits of the transition to Zabbix 3.4
Andrew Nelson, Red Hat, his red hat and Ansible
Andrew Nelson talked about how Ansible can help use Zabbix in configuration management and agent deployment.
And also information about Ansible Tower: how to further simplify the use of Ansible with Zabbix (see github.com/ansible/awx for the source version on github )
Large Zabbix cluster. How to do it right. Vladimir Ulogov
Vladimir began with a brief overview of modern cloud technologies for dummies. Next is how to deploy Zabbix in the clouds. What architecture is suitable for this? What options are generally possible? Vladimir's speech is filled with useful tips on these topics.
Switching to Zabbix - The Orange Slovensko Story by Gabriel Farkas
What makes big telecoms move away from traditional commercial monitoring solutions?
First of all, this is the price of a license. Or a “license prison” as aptly defined by Gabriel Farkas of Orange Slovensko.
What helped him choose Zabbix among other open source solutions? Gossip! ;) And the versatile experience of his partner from Slovakia.
Strengths Zabbix considers Fault managemant, Performance management, SLA, Inventory, web-monitoring and a number of other things.
See the presentation for details on how Orange Slovensko planned the migration to Zabbix, how it went, and what they will do next.
Zabbix in a large enterprise. History of Gardner Denver. Chris Mackenna
Chris McKenna provides another example of how well-known enterprises benefit from open source solutions such as Zabbix.
The presentation tells the story of how IT Managed Solutions built a powerful and efficient monitoring solution based on Zabbix using Grafana, Victor Ops and ServiceNow.
Zabbix agent emulator for AS / 400. An interesting example of a non-trivial solution from a Zabbix user
An experienced Zabbix user, system analyst at Rietumu Bank Konstantin Oshmyan, spoke about why the bank chose Zabbix to monitor IBM AS / 400 and other IBM solutions. While earlier, IBM Tivoli was used for monitoring.
Among the main reasons: the simplicity of Zabbix, SLA management, friendly technical support.
Since there was no off-the-shelf Zabbix agent under AS / 400, Konstantin developed his own agent emulator that runs on the Zabbix agent protocol.
You can download it here: share.zabbix.com
Case study: monitoring 7,000 servers at Intesa Sanpaolo Bank
Quadrata employees told the story of the successful use of Zabbix for monitoring large-scale IT infrastructure using the example of a leading Italian bank. The presentation contains a number of details of the solution for monitoring the Veritas cluster using Zabbix and how the Zabbix API is used to build custom dashboard.
Patrick Jutterhoven on the road to Zabbix full automation
Patrick (Patrik Uytterhoeven) spoke about the experience of process automation in Zabbix and the problems overcome in this way.
In the presentation, details of choosing hardware, software settings, using Smart templates, scripts for automation, Grafana, LLD (which appeared in Zabbix, including as a result of their order).
A decent result - this is how the data element update queue now looks:
About how important it is to be ... red
Everyone needs a good monitoring solution. Especially if you are one of the world leaders in luxury online retail!
Andrea and Enrico, two expressive Italian admins responsible for monitoring at the Yoox Net-A-Porter Group (luxury fashion), talked about how they use Zabbix, deployed on AWS.
Although the slides convey only part of their emotional performance, they also contain many useful details on how to build monitoring in the cloud.
What happened on day 2 - read on our next blog!
All the presentations mentioned above can be viewed here . Videos will be coming soon!
PS The article is also available in English on our blog .
