Zabbix Introduction
This section is part of the Zabbix & Elrond Guide
You start here your Zabbix learning journey, enjoy it and feel free to move back and forth in the guide at your own pace.
Monitoring System
When you have a system working 24/7 like an Elrond Node, you want to keep an eye of it.
Mainly this piece of software must help you to:
Detect possible improvements to have better rating & more rewards
Get notifications if something went wrong to help fix it quickly
Why Zabbix?
There are plenty of solutions out there to monitor: Zabbix, Icinga2, Nagios, Sensu… we encourage you to check them, maybe other solutions will suit you better.
We selected Zabbix mainly for 3 reasons:
Reputation
Community
Learning Material
Zabbix has 22 years, is one hundred percent open source and has more than 300.000 installations. This platform is well known in the IT community.
The Zabbix Forum is a good place to ask questions, with threads on a lot of local communities in a variety of languages such as Spanish or Russian. You also have the Zabbix Share, a free marketplace to share templates and modules. Finally, you have the Zabbix Meetups, last year there where 7 of them all around the world.
In the learning section there are of course Zabbix Manuals in 7 languages and more than 20 Zabbix Books (big ones) in 7 languages that you can buy in digital or printed editions. And the Zabbix Youtube Channel has more than 300 videos. Plus if you search ‘zabbix’ on youtube you will get more than 100.000 videos of the community with tutorials and help.
Zabbix Components
ZABBIX SERVER:
The Zabbix Server is a service that connects to the agents regularly, ask the agent for the new dataset, and stores it in the database.
Apache Server provides a web interface and connects to the zabbix server for info if it needs something.
The database is a key point of the Zabbix server, we can choose between MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreeSQL.
We recommend to put the server in a linux small vps, for the use case of elrond you don’t need a big one.
ZABBIX AGENT:
It’s a small service running in every server that you want to monitor. They are 3 kinds of agents:
Passive Agent: listens to the port until the server request data and sends it
Active Agent: it decides when and what data to send
Hybrid Agent: sends active data as a passive agent using an exception, but taking care that this kind of data can go only one by one.