Part 86: Thanks to Zabbix, a possible early warning about a dying HDD

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.

Part 84: Increase the availability of your Selenium with HAProxy

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.

Part 83: Just a second

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.

Part 82: Tracking a cruise ship

One of my colleagues still has not learned that if she goes for a vacation, she should not give me the exact name of the cruise ship she's going to. What do I do? Of course, I monitor the cruise ship location with Zabbix.

Tracking a cruise ship? WHY?

Because I can. This all started when she sent me a link to one of the ship tracking sites, like FlightRadar, but for maritime vessels. My response back was "I need to add this to my Zabbix", and here we are.