Your first data streams with Zabbix
This section is part of Zabbix & Elrond Guide
Here we’ll show examples of how to add a host, apply a template and look at data collected.
CREATE A NEW HOST
Now we will setup our first server (Host) in zabbix. Open your frontend http://ipofyourzabbixserver/zabbix and go to the top left menu: Configuration —> Hosts
You will see a list of hosts, in your case probably only your own server. Top-right you have a button “Create Host”, click on it.
To go quicker we will focus only on the interesting fields for now, you can learn more about the others in the Zabbix Manual.
Host name: this is the second most important value here. Remember that this must be exactly the same Hostname that you write on the zabbix agent config file.
Visible name: this is how you want to see it on the frontend. Maybe the hostname is vmi78677 and you want it as “Server London”.
Groups: it’s mandatory, so you must click on select to search one. You must have one with the installation. If you want can create a new hosts group, for example “Elrond Nodes”.
Agent interface: here you must put the ip where the zabbix agent is running. Remember that we configured too on the zabbix agent config file the ip of the zabbix server. This way they see each other. Don’t change the default port.
Description: if you want to clarify something you can write a description.
Finally click on Add.
If you go to Configuration —> Hosts you must see your list of hosts with your new one created there. It hasn’t items, triggers, templates. At this moment it is empty.
APPLY NEW TEMPLATE
We can create manually every one of these elements, but to go quickly we’ll learn how to apply a template. Click on the name of your new Host to go to edition page of the host.
Click on Templates tab to look into this section. You will see 2 fields:
Linked templates: there are your current templates linked to this host
Link new templates: here you can select a new template to apply to this host
Click on select to search a template, you will see that there are plenty of them installed. Search for the one called “Template OS Linux by Zabbix Agent”, enable the checkbox at his right and click on button Select.
You’ll see it now on Link new templates, it’s important to click on Update button to apply this changes.
Now in the hosts list you see that you server has a lot of things, you see numbers near items, triggers, etc.
If you click again in the menu Configuration —> Hosts to refresh this list, you must see now that next to “Enabled” now you see a green ZBX new indicator. It means that Zabbix Server is receiving data from this agent through ZBX protocol. Zabbix server can use other protocols like SNMP.
Templates on Zabbix are linked, it means that if you have 10 servers with the same template linked and you add a new trigger “on the template” it will be running in all your 10 servers, as these changes are linked. If you want to create a trigger only on one of your hosts, then instead of creating it on the template you must create the trigger on the host editing page.
LOOK YOUR NEW ITEMS
Go to you hosts list and click on items to take a look now.
Inside item page of your hosts you have first a lot of filter options, like Applications, History and others. It helps to have everything well organized as on a Monitoring system you can end up with a lot of items.
If you scroll down you will see your current items on the host. Take for example this one:
You can see in the name of the item that it comes from a “Template Module CPU by Zabbix Agent”. On Zabbix you can create templates that aggregate other templates. In this case we have linked a big template to our new host that includes several templates like this particular one about CPU metrics.
We can see that this item has a trigger, the parameters that Zabbix Server will send to the agent to request the data. And things like the interval of asking and storing new data. In this case Zabbix Server will save one value every minute.
Explore other items and look around to your new triggers and graphs in the Host Edition page.
YOUR NEW MONITORING DATA
Now we’ll look into the data that Zabbix is collecting and storing in the database.
In the upper left menu go to Monitoring —> Latest Data
Again you have a very good filter to select what data you want to see. On Application select “interface eth0”, as we have seen an Application is a set of items, which show them together. You must see something like this:
Here you see the last value collected of every item and the change between this and the previous value.
Now search for the “Interface eth0: Bits received” and click on the right “Graph” link. You will see a chart, and can change the time window on the upper part, select for example last 15 minutes.
Up near the star icon you will see a dropdown menu named “View As”, if you change it to “Values” instead of Graph you will look exactly at the values stored in the database, each of them: time and value.
Congratulations, you are now monitoring your server.
Now it’s time to play around, look at other data sets and the values collected before you go to the next chapter.