OpenAI's latest ChatGPT 4o image generator has been all the rave lately. But did you know it can help you to generate Zabbix templates and other very technical stuff in the silliest way possible - by just drafting something on paper? This is not perfect yet, coming with all the gotchas that you have with the code generated by LLMs, but oh boy how we live in the future. Observe!

The original drawing

This was me last night just typing... no what's the old-fashioned way... writing on a paper. I feel bad for you as you try to decipher my handwriting. 

Earlier this year, Maikki the poodle joined our family, and it's about time that we start monitoring her. This time the idea came from my wife, as she spotted Invoxia Minitailz smart AI collar for dogs during some dog training session she attended to. Yesterday Maikki entered the sweet, sweet world of monitoring.

Many years ago, maybe around 2017 or 2018, one of my ex-colleagues (Hi, Kevin!) said that I probably would use Zabbix even to come up with the lottery numbers. Back then, just to strike back, I did exactly that, with a small easter egg in work Zabbix containing the lotto numbers. That was a quick bash script feeding the Zabbix item.

Now, let's return to that topic, but use Zabbix Script item type instead. Also, let's take a look at few other details that help in monitoring.

Wouldn't it be fancy if your Zabbix could tell you if your Raspberry Pi would have a pending EEPROM update waiting for you? It's so easy just to upgrade all the packages and forget to update the EEPROM with sudo rpi-eeprom-update -a. 

Luckily there's a simple way to make Zabbix to check this for you.

Would you like to get AI added to your Zabbix now? Like, RIGHT NOW? In few minutes with no account, no payment, no server, no scripting, no strings attached? 

One of the monZphere's modules that easily flies under the radar without nobody noticing would be their AIModuleMonzphere, freely available from GitHub. 

What makes it different? Most likely your AI additions call home to their mothership, or at the very least consult their local LLM server hosted somewhere in your network. 

Last year, I did blog about monZphere's custom Zabbix widgets a few times. For those who don't know, monZphere is a company specialized for building custom Zabbix modules and widgets. Some of the modules are free for all of us and can be found from monZphere's GitHub page, some do cost money, but oh boy how their modules do change Zabbix interface and the ways you can use it. 

Can you monitor the signal strength of your different Wi-Fi devices that are connected to your (home) router with Zabbix? Of course you can! This is a really quick morning post before I hop on to my work duties, showing also how ChatGPT or any LLM can boost your productivity when doing this kind of things.

In my previous post I did show some command-line tools that could be useful for showing interesting metrics about your Mac. I also told that in the follow-up post I would show you how to monitor your Apple Silicon (with that, I mean Apple M-series chips CPU/GPU/ANE [Apple Neural Engine]) with Zabbix.

I'm almost successful with that, but then still embarrassingly far. This has not been my most successful project so far. I am sure there would be so many better ways -- if so, please let me know! 

When using command line, I of course have my trusted tool belt with plenty of legendary shell commands that have been around for decades. But just to keep myself fresh and not become a grumpy Unix greybeard, every now and then I explore what's out there today. Here are some tips that may or may not help you with Zabbix as well.

I've been a bit silent since the Maikki the puppy takes a lot of time. Anyway, here's something different to give you new ideas. 

About every company out there is rolling out their new innovative AI solutions (aka "here, have a yet another OpenAI wrapper"), and so am I -- though through local LLMs and shell one-liners to make these ground-breaking innovations tad a bit easier for you to use and brainstorm with new ideas. By using these, you'll be also using reasoning AI running on your local machine, for free. Good boy, you!