With Zabbix 7.0 improved widget framework, the game clearly is on and the custom modules are popping out.
My greatest thanks to Matheus Da Silva Andrade, founder of monZphere, the first company in the world that is 100% focused on Zabbix module development. He kindly granted me access to his test environment, and I've been poking the custom modules he has made so far. There are several of them, and I'll be creating separate blog entries about each of them. Of course, I'll leave the most exciting module to be the last one. Some of the modules are still under development, I got kind of early access to provide my feedback and to blog about the modules.
With these caveat emptors out of the way, let's move on to first custom widget, which is a vastly improved maintenance calendar.
Built-in maintenance admin interface
In case you for some reason have NOT seen the built-in Zabbix maintenance user interface, it looks like this. It works, but from the overview it can be challenging to visualize the upcoming maintenance windows, even though the dates are visible.
Also, when creating a new maintenance, the dialog itself works, but could benefit from an overhaul.
monZphere maintenance calendar
This is where monZphere's improved maintenance calendar steps in. First, let's take a look at its new maintenance period creation dialog.
Now that's definitely more modern! And -- Matheus, correct me if I'm wrong -- but it seems that the dialog can also pick up the past maintenance dates with the same subject. See, few days ago I created a new fake maintenance called What's up, home? maintenance and now that I today created a new entry with the same name, my previous maintenance is listed on maintenance dates part of the window as well. Even if that would be an unintended side effect, it's very useful in my opinion.
But let's get to more important part of this module, which is how it looks like when looking at the upcoming and past maintenances. When visualizing what's about to happen and when, of course we humans can parse calendar view much better than a list of dates. That's exactly what monZphere is doing. Let's start with the monthly view.
Now that's handy, that's like looking at the calendar of your phone, Outlook, whatever ... or just a good old paper calendar.
The monthly view ain't the only view available, there's also weekly and daily views.
And if I click on any scheduled maintenance, I get to see this.
Conclusion
In my opinion this is a very good enhancement to regular Zabbix maintenance user interface. Visually much better, and the familiar calendar interface makes understanding the upcoming maintenances much easier. There are small details to improve here and there, but for an initial version that's still a bit under development, this is excellent!
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