Part 145: Catchier visualization for Zabbix SLA

What's up, home? part 145 cover image

Those who work in IT industry, know the drill. The Suits love (or hate) SLA percentages. It's in their genes to be aware of how many seconds or minutes or hours your super important service have been up or down today, this week, this month, or any other time interval. I get all the reasons for that, and I love those statistics too -- at least as long as they show favorable numbers. 

Default Zabbix SLA reporting widget

Zabbix is great in gathering those SLA metrics. It also can show you an SLA report, but in my opinion there's few problems with this default SLA reporting widget. Let's take a look at my home freezer SLA report.

Zabbix default SLA report

See the problems?

  1. A Suit with bad eyesight cannot see what's going on. Font is small, you can only make it larger by adjusting the browser font size, which then tears everything else apart.
  2. There's an average severity risk that a Suit will severely hurt their neck while trying to decipher the dates.
  3. This kind of visualization is lacking the enterprise-level laser-focused 360 degrees holistic view enabling the mission, so they circle back to you for the statistics anyway.

Let's vibe code

Sometimes you don't need an SLA report that travels back in time too much. Sometimes you only need a widget which shows exactly one number, just like Zabbix Item value widget is doing perfectly well.

So, I kindly requested Claude Code to create me a new SLA widget, one which would resemble the Item value widget. After bit of prompting back and forth, here's the result. This widget won't 100% cover the need for a report like the one Zabbix ships with by default, but for quick look for only one number (or several if you slap many SLA widgets to one dashboard) this is a better approach in my opinion.

Final widget

Freezer SLA widget

That's a Freezer temperature SLA report for my Freezer service. Good thing it seems to stay at 100%. The widget also shows a sparkline of SLA history, or would show if my freezer would have been more erratic than this. To show what happens when things are not that stable, we need to look at how badly I suck with the success rate of me applying my face cream. 

Janne's facial cream apply SLA %

The widget also has a nice little configuration dialog.

SLA widget confiiguration dialog

I will release this widget one day. First I will take a look at the code at least a little bit. Seems to work just fine on my home laptop, though. For super braves of you who would like to test it out, please contact me via LinkedIn or e-mail me to contact at whatsuphome.fi.

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