Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

Once again, I will be a speaker at the Zabbix Summit 2024 -- this time I'll keep the talk on brand new AI track, the topic being What's up, home? goes Generative AI. 

See you at the summit!

The following is a story about partially black monitoring with many missing details due reasons told later in this post, but is also a story about how a single hint on your dashboard can sometimes be your best friend.

Last year my Raspberry Pi 4 SD card started to tell me it should be retired. Some I/O errors, and more than that, suddenly the I/O request times started to be up to 10,000-20,000 milliseconds.

If you wonder why I've been so silent lately, it's because of I had my personal maintenance window going on for a month. In other words, I enjoyed my summer holiday. 

While I was away from keyboard, the nice fellows at InitMAX sent me two more pro versions of their custom Zabbix 7.0 widgets: gaugeMAX and ItemMAX. I'll create separate blog posts about them and today start with gaugeMAX.

Who wouldn't need a HAProxy in front of their Selenium instances at home? I guess nobody would NEED it but here we are.

I had my Zabbix Selenium tests running on my personal Mac. The trouble is/was that if I took my Mac away from home, or did take it offline for any reason, my tests broke. That. Is. Not. Good.

Zabbix 7.0 is fast. Not only it is fast for the new performance it gained underneath, but it also feels fast even on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Me being me, the following truly is an idea brought to you by Bad Idea Panda. Please, please do not try this at home. Or actually, DO try this at home, or any lab, but under any circumstances, DO NOT try this in production. Clear? Clear. Good, let's continue.

One of my colleagues still has not learned that if she goes for a vacation, she should not give me the exact name of the cruise ship she's going to. What do I do? Of course, I monitor the cruise ship location with Zabbix.

Tracking a cruise ship? WHY?

Because I can. This all started when she sent me a link to one of the ship tracking sites, like FlightRadar, but for maritime vessels. My response back was "I need to add this to my Zabbix", and here we are.

Zabbix 7.0 custom widgets game is on! The wonderful team at initMAX gave me access to Pro versions of their new Zabbix 7.0 widgets, so of course I'm now testing them in my own style. The first widget I got my hands on is Message of the Day.

A quick tip to possibly give you new ideas.

As Zabbix got the new fantastic Selenium-based synthetic web tests, you will now have a new component to monitor. How do you monitori Selenium? With Zabbix, of course! If you are inpatient, feel free to download my very bare bones example template.

Zabbix 7.0rc2 was released few days ago, and one of the most striking additions to it is the pre-built template for the new Selenium-based website monitoring. Of course I had to try it out.

Earlier this week, I immediately installed Zabbix 7.0beta3 when it came out. Back then I quickly tried out the new Honeycomb widget with some actual data.

As a regular follower of a weird gaming channel Let's Game It Out on YouTube, I couldn't resist thinking in that channel host Josh voice in my head saying "I wonder if there's a limit..." (to the number of elements you can have on Honeycomb widget).

Select ALL the things!

My What's up, home? Zabbix is very small, with only 3172 active items.