zabbix

Yesterday Zabbix blog had a fascinating entry on how you can use Zabbix to monitor Zabbix Security Advisories. The blog post does go above and beyond to make sure that everything gets captures planned, and does so by using web scraping and AWS Lambdas, for example. Their solution for sure generates better results than what I'm going to show you, but what I'm offering here is a solution that's 100% produced within Zabbix instead of using any 3rd party code.

Those who follow me on LinkedIn might have noticed already that this morning I mentioned about the recently revamped zabbix-cli. The tool has been rewritten from ground up and now it's really cool thing to use! Here are some examples how I can use it for monitoring my home.

Now it looks cool

It has colours, tables, advanced auto-completion, all kinds of goodies! Below is a short snippet from --help option.

After all Qubes OS and monZphere blogging, let's get closer to original theme of my blog - home monitoring, or monitoring myself.

Zabbix 7.0 API got a nice little history.push method, allowing you to send data to Zabbix over its API. How I'm going to use it? Thanks for asking, I'm going to send the song names of the music I'm listening to. For the sake of simplicity, this entry shows how to send a single value.

As part of my monZphere custom Zabbix modules blogging spree, here comes the next one. This is where things are getting more exciting. What if you could do your Zabbix tasks just by chatting with a friendly chatbot? What if I told you that you can actually do that today?

Here's yet another module by monZphere: Kanban view of your incidents. 

Standard Zabbix Problems view

Before going on to how it looks like, here's the standard Problems view in Zabbix, in case you would not have used Zabbix.

With Zabbix 7.0 improved widget framework, the game clearly is on and the custom modules are popping out.

Yesterday I promised, or at least wrote, that I might not monitor my Qubes OS virtual machines. But, as a monitoring addict, I had to do that. As this is just boring usual Linux monitoring, let's at least use the automatic agent registration feature of Zabbix to do this.

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.

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.