Would you like to be able to tell your manager much faster how often some alert happens and how rapidly that particular alert usually gets resolved? How about how often the alert has happened during the past 30 days compared to previous 30 days? I have great news for you!
Good old Monzphere released today a very useful Zabbix dashboard widget, Recurring Incidents. As the name says, it shows you how often some problem happens. But that's not all, as the module also compares the trends for recurrence, mean time to resolution and more.
Since the module is open source and free, I installed it to my home Zabbix just out of curiosity.
This is how the module looks like
It's very similar to traditional Problems view but with a twist -- many fields are replaced with columns that can be very suitable during incident management reporting and when attempting to reduce alert noise. This will definitely be useful at home too, as for example our Zigbee connected lights have recently been a bit unreliable with their availability or reaction times. Maybe this module will help me to connect the dots.
Too small? Let's look those details bit closer. You might already see how this will bring light to my Zigbee issue. Those alerts with "Living room..." are about some of our living room lights, and whenever the lights drop from the Zigbee network, they are only out for a minute, but then again they might as well be out for five minutes.
Whenever this happens, the lights stay on if they were already on, or off if they were already off, no matter how many times we try to toggle their state. Annoying, but at least now I will have some data about the frequency and average problem duration per light.
Installing and configuring Recurring Incidents
Installing the module is just the matter of cloning the git repo, copying it under /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/, going to Zabbix Administration -> Modules, clicking on Rescan directory, and enabling the module. Done!
Next, add it as a new widget to any dashboard you like. You'll get the following configuration dialog.
It's almost like configuring the usual Problems view, so apart from few differences nothing too difficult to understand going on in there. Nice option is to be able to define the minimum number of occurrences before some alert appears in the widget, making filtering the actually problematic and repeating alerts to pop up.
Overall, this a very good addition to Swiss-army knife that is the Zabbix module collection.
