It's been one hundred blog posts already! Wow! To celebrate that, this blog post will be covering some of the past, the present, and the future.
Zabbix Summit 2024 aftermath
This year, Zabbix Summit 2024 was probably the best ever personally. It seemed that everybody knew me, and I got very good contacts from several companies and met great new people. The speaks, the parties, the food, the people, Riga, everything just excellent. Thank you!
Here's my What's up, home? goes Generative AI speech from the summit:
Monitor your unsaved documents with Zabbix
Not going to write a full detailed post about this one unless you dear readers want, but here's something I noticed and almost already implemented today.
I was creating a post-Zabbix Summit 2024 presentation to my teammates and some other teams at Forcepoint. I was using macOS Keynote for that, and after throwing in few slides I noticed that Keynote did not allow me to save my then still unsaved presentation. No matter if I tried to save the presentation as native Keynote file or export it to PDF/PowerPoint, Keynote only threw the macOS beachball at me. After a minute of beachballing Keynote returned to it previous state, but at no point did it show me the usual file save dialog.
"OK pal, you have this presentation saved somewhere as you can do the crash recovery", I thought.
Going to shell and investigating with
lsof -n | egrep -i "keynote.*unsaved.*key" Did give me back this
Keynote 19356 myforcepointusername 24r REG 1,18 30374775 376806659 /Users/myforcepointusername/Library/Containers/com.apple.iWork.Keynote/Data/Library/Autosave Information/Unsaved Keynote Document.key
I then just copied that /Users.... file with usual cp to another location with new name. Presto, I had the document, and weirdly enough when I opened that in Keynote, the saving functionality started to work just as it should.
Okay but what has this to do with Zabbix?
If you did not figure that out yet, you don't have my imagination. If you want to get alerted -- or at least just monitor the number of unsaved files with the facts that how long you have them before you proceed to save the file the first time -- just add a new Zabbix item that keeps the count of the files matching that pattern using lsof. Or use the Zabbix agent directory functions to count the number of files on that Autosave Information directory. Do that in real-time, or use a cronjob for lsof output, or use Zabbix API history.push to push the info to Zabbix. Use Zabbix Trapper. Your imagination will be the limit.
Do whatever you want, this one is easy to monitor if you so will.
What's next for What's up, home?
Heh, like at this point I would know. More weird ad-hoc monitoring stuff, that is for sure!
I got already as far that I replaced my Linux laptop Qubes OS installation with Proxmox VE. I will need that for some tasks extending beyond my precious little home project, but of course the laptop will soon run some virtual machines and/or containers dedicated for the blog.
And, of course I'm monitoring my home Proxmox already with Zabbix, as it has the native template for monitoring!
