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Part 119: Draw your Zabbix templates

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By whatsuphome | 10:28 AM EEST, Wed April 09, 2025

TL;DR

I sketched a Zabbix monitoring template on paper, took a photo, and used ChatGPT 4o's image generation to convert the drawing into working Zabbix YAML. The output is not perfect and comes with typical LLM code quirks, but it demonstrates a futuristic way
What's up, home? part 119 cover image

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. 

Original drawing

Let's move on to ChatGPT

Now watch this:

Me asking ChatGPT to follow the instructions on the image

Curious about the output?

Here's the generated YAML. By no means it's perfect, and as said, comes with all the usual LLM generated code gotchas but really this is super futuristic and can be so useful in many scenarios.

zabbix_export:
 version: '6.0'
 templates:
   - template:
       name: "Template MyApp Monitoring"
       description: "Monitors MyApp logs and HTTP(S) availability with content check."
       groups:
         - name: "Templates/Applications"
       items:
         - name: "MyApp log error detection"
           key: 'log[/var/log/myapp.log,Error,,skip,,]'
           type: ZABBIX_ACTIVE
           value_type: TEXT
           tags:
             - tag: Application
               value: MyApp
             - tag: Team
               value: WhatsUpTeam
         - name: "MyApp HTTPS response time"
           key: 'web.test.time[MyApp_HTTPS,download]'
           type: SIMPLE
           value_type: FLOAT
           units: s
           tags:
             - tag: Application
               value: MyApp
             - tag: Team
               value: WhatsUpTeam
       httptests:
         - name: "MyApp_HTTPS"
           agent: "Zabbix"
           steps:
             - name: "Step 1 - Check 443 and content"
               url: "https://demo.whatsupname.fi/"
               status_codes: "200"
               required: "What's up, Home?"
               timeout: 5s
       triggers:
         - expression: '{Template MyApp Monitoring:web.test.time[MyApp_HTTPS,download].last()} > 1'
           name: "MyApp average response time too high"
           severity: AVERAGE
           tags:
             - tag: Application
               value: MyApp
         - expression: '{Template MyApp Monitoring:web.test.fail[MyApp_HTTPS].last()}=1 or {Template MyApp Monitoring:web.test.rspcode[MyApp_HTTPS,Step 1 - Check 443 and content].last()}<>200'
           name: "MyApp is down or content mismatch"
           severity: DISASTER
           tags:
             - tag: Application
               value: MyApp
             - tag: Team
               value: WhatsUpTeam
       macros:
         - macro: '{$MYAPP_HOST_IP}'
           value: '192.168.1.1'
         - macro: '{$MYAPP_HOSTNAME}'
           value: 'demo.whatsupname.fi'

Bonus example

See a car crashing!

whatsuphome
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I sketched a Zabbix monitoring template on paper, took a photo, and used ChatGPT 4o's image generation to convert the drawing into working Zabbix YAML. The output is not perfect and comes with typical LLM code quirks, but it demonstrates a futuristic way

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Who am I?

  • Janne Pikkarainen from Finland 🇫🇮
  • Began with computers in 1986 with C64
  • Doing IT for living since 1999
  • Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Forcepoint
  • A Zabbix Summit speaker every year since 2022
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