Zabbix Summit 2022 in Riga: Keeping hundreds of Windows Zabbix agents in sync across different customers

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be one of the speakers at Zabbix Summit 2022 in Riga. As moderator of the Zabbix Telegram and Zabbix reddit community, I was asked by Zabbix to present at the premier event about Zabbix monitoring.

The 10th Zabbix Summit is taking place in Riga, Latvia on October 7-8. My speech is titled:

Keeping hundreds of Windows Zabbix agents in sync across different customers

As a Managed Services Provider (MSP) we are responsible for dozens of customers, with hundreds of Windows Servers. Therefore, we introduced mechanisms to automatically deploy, configure, and sync Windows Zabbix agents across all these isolated environments. In this process, we leverage a tool set consisting of Azure DevOps, Git, PowerShell, and a publicly available Zabbix agent auto-updater, to provide all our customers’ servers with the latest Zabbix agent configuration possible.

Marco Hofmann is an IT-Systems Engineer with 15+ years worth of experience. He works at the german Managed Services Provider ANAXCO GmbH. His priority is the configuration and maintenance of the company’s central Zabbix environment, which is a key component in the fulfillment of the customers’ maintenance contracts. He also focuses on designing and configuring Citrix RDSH environments, fully automated with PowerShell.

Zabbix Telegram Community: https://t.me/ZabbixTech

Zabbix reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/zabbix/

Zabbix website: http://www.zabbix.com/

All speeches from Zabbix Summit will be recorded and uploaded a few weeks later.

Zabbix Frontend Modules

Leveraging the new feature of Zabbix 5.0 LTS, these Frontend Modules can extend the Zabbix Sidebar menu.

Introduction

You can read more about this new feature in the official Zabbix documentation:
https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/modules

The modules in this repository were tested on Zabbix 5.0.2+ on Debian 10 Buster.

Frontend modules
Frontend modules

Continue reading “Zabbix Frontend Modules”

Zabbix Template Net MTR (My traceroute)

A Zabbix template for mtr (My traceroute). It uses all the new features from Zabbix 4.4 and 5.0 with Master Items, JSONpath processing and Dependent items.
This template was built on Zabbix 5.0.x and Debian 9 & 10 amd64 with mtr-tiny.

Installation

  1. Copy the script file mtr.sh to the ExternalScripts folder on your Zabbix Server or Proxy.
  2. Make the script executable: chmod +x mtr.sh
  3. Import the Template to your Zabbix Server.
  4. Link the template to the target host. From there on Zabbix Server or Proxy will discover and monitor the hops between itself and the target’s HOST IP using the {HOST.IP} macro.

Continue reading “Zabbix Template Net MTR (My traceroute)”

Zabbix Linux vfs User parameter Templates

Zabbix monitoring offers several virtual file system item types out of the box. But there are still some missing. I created a GitHup Repository to provide some additional items as User parameter.

During my daily work I was tasked with two additional values, Zabbix should provide to our Administrators:

  • Were Linux configuration files from a certain installed daemon modified? (/etc/postfix/)
  • What is the timestamp of the oldest file in a certain directory? (EDI)

In both cases, the affected machines are Debian Linux virtual machines with Zabbix agent 3.4+ installed and configured. Zabbix offers no way to solve these challenges out of the box, but is easily customizable via User Parameter and custom Low Level Discovery to add this features. Continue reading “Zabbix Linux vfs User parameter Templates”

Installing the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Debian Linux with Saltstack

Installing the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Debian Linux (msodbcsql17) with Saltstack requires to pass ACCEPT_EULA=Y to the package manager. This blog post shows a possible solution.

Introduction

Microsoft offers several open source utilities for quite some time now. One is the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Linux which can be leveraged with unixodbc. In my case, I need this driver to query Microsoft SQL Server for my Zabbix ODBC monitoring, to execute native SQL queries for monitoring purposes. As I have to take control over 30+ Zabbix Proxies, I’m currently transforming all of them into Salt minions. My goal here is to achieve 100% automation, as soon as I install the Salt minion on a fresh Debian Linux. Continue reading “Installing the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Debian Linux with Saltstack”