zabbix

I was supposed to show you some dashboard creation, but Zabbix 7.0beta2 came out today and of course I had to update to it. The update itself was just as uneventful as I hoped -- with my Raspberry Pi, the whole process went through in about a minute. This blog post is probably among the shortest I have ever made, but the one new feature made me post this immediately. There are other new features like still more performance tuning under the hood, smaller cosmetic changes such as new icons, but the one that got me excited is...

As Zabbix 7.0 gains some enhancements in DNS monitoring, too, let's add to that my synthetic monitoring toolpack theme of the week. I'm not actually sure if my global testing is global in reality, as this is going through Proton VPN. The results look such similar that maybe the tests are using some nearby Proton VPN DNS server... I didn't yet check with Wireshark. Anyway, let's imagine this would work.

As a continuation to my previous global blog HTTP response time monitoring, let's continue with tracerouting. Apart from extremely small modification, for this feature, I cannot take the credit, but it belongs to this guy. It's time to add some fancy mtr data to Zabbix!

My blog has global audience, so would be nice to know how well the site itself is reachable from different points of this planet. In this blog post, I'll setup a very different solution with Zabbix to do that. No remote proxies or agents, just a single home router and a VPN service. 

Also, in this story, I probably found out a small bug from Zabbix web scenarios, or how Zabbix or its agents behaves with them. I will let the Zabbix team to decide.

Now that my (admittedly repetitive) Generative AI blog has been up and running for a while, it's time to give you ideas how to utilize this AI weirdness inside your Zabbix or Grafana, too.

How about an automatically updated alert summary for the next on-call person around the time the shift is about to change? There would be multiple ways of doing that, in my case I did it like this.

Create a cronjob

My cronjob runs the following every hour: 

For those of you who were present in Zabbix Summit 2023 in Riga, Latvia do probably remember how InitMAX demoed their Zabbix 7.0 ChatGPT widget. That was and is extremely cool, but even though the plugin itself is freely available and open source, using it with ChatGPT requires a ChatGPT account and real money.

As I now have GPT4All perfectly suitable for writing fascinating stories about everything, why not to utilize it even more? Please welcome the new spin-off website, What's up, home? Generative AI Edition. A cronjob running on my What's up, home? environment will run itself every morning 7am Finnish time, generate a fresh new story based on active Zabbix alerts, and post it to the new website over Drupal API.

Maybe you'd like to have a random desktop background picture? Or one of your dashboards would need a changing image? Let the alerts flowing in to your alerting system be your artist.

As I am now entering the dungeons of Generative AI, of course I'm having some fun. Instead of just analyzing a single alert through Zabbix manual actions, how about using the Zabbix API and the official zabbix_utils for querying the active alerts and feeding the list to GPT4All?

I just integrated my Zabbix with locally running generative AI in five minutes. You could do it, too. Here's how.

Install GPT4All

For my test, I'm using GPT4All, or its Python libraries. Install it with 

pip install gpt4all

Next, I took one of their example scripts and added very primitive command line argument handling. Here's the full Python script.