Zabbix Interface & Glossary
This section is part of Zabbix & Elrond Guide
At this point you have installed your Zabbix Server and your Agent. We will take a small tour of the frontend. Enter into Zabbix Server again in your Browser with http://youripzabbixserver/zabbix remember that default user is Admin and password zabbix.
TOP-RIGHT MENU
In this part of the frontend you have the main search bar, something like the google of your Zabbix Server. Zabbix Share is like a market place where people share their templates and plugins. In the user icon, you can select dark theme(if you like it) and change your password.
TOP-LEFT MENU
This is the menu that you will use more and more, the main components of Zabbix are here.
Monitoring: all that you need about current data collected. You will also see current alerts and status of your servers here.
Inventory: it’s a function that we as validators of Elrond will not use, it is used to take inventory of hardware pieces of computers, very useful for companies with large number of devices.
Reports: again another section that we will not use a lot. It’s to create specific reports in a format like pdf and used to send to your company board etc.
Configuration: this we’ll use a lot, it’s where you define your servers, items, alerts. Where you apply a template for example.
Administration: this part is special to configure notifications by email, user groups, permissions, etc.
GLOSSARY
At his point is good to clarify some vocabulary concepts of Zabbix:
Host: it’s a machine, a server, where maybe you are running 3 nodes. A host always has a unique IP and zabbix agent running on it.
Group of Hosts: very useful when you want to create for example a group of your servers in a specific datacenter. And currently you can use it too to setup permissions for a group of users.
Item: something that you want to keep tracking. For example in a server if you have 2 nodes running and want to track 2 metrics you will have a total of 4 items: an item x metric x node. Think on it as a unique identifier where zabbix will store a value every certain time, like: [item-id,timestamp,value] in the database. Simplifying it somehow.
Applications: is something like item-groups. It’s very useful, say that you have 2 items about CPU and 2 items about Disk. You can create an Application for each one and later is easier to group the info that you visualize.
Triggers: it’s one of the most important parts of Zabbix, specially for Elrond Validators. A trigger is something that changes to mode ON under some circumstances. You specify the circumstances to activate the trigger to mode ON. And the rules to turn it OFF again. For example, if CPU load last 5m goes above 3 turn this trigger ON.
Severity: Zabbix Server works with 6 levels of importance in its triggers: From Not classified to Disaster. You can make things like only send me an email if the severity is above Critical.
Alert: the system is able to alert you when a trigger is ON, for example sending an alert by email.
Graphs: you can configure a graph, and save it with its rules and items, to use it later in a dashboard design.
Discovery Rules: very interesting function, you can define some rules here and in the agent. Using this Zabbix is able to create items or triggers dinamically. For example if in your server there are 2 nodes running and you have a discovery rule that create a node-connected-peer item for each node in the machine, you don’t need to create them manually.
Actions: you can create a command, for example execute this linux command, and setup that when a trigger is ON the system execute this or that action. For example, I’m getting without disk space, clean tmp folder.
Templates: it’s a set of items, triggers, graphs and discovery rules. Nearly everything except hosts. You can apply a template to a host, and if there’s a discovery rule in the template you will get created all the items and triggers. A very interesting feature.