Applications have evolved from being standalone to client-server models to eventually cloud-based elastic applications. Application performance can directly impact a business’s revenue, as customers struggle to complete the process. It has been difficult to see the inside of the system. It has become an essential part of the system. A good monitoring tool will allow us to monitor the system and identify when it is acting normally and when it is acting abnormally. The tool will alert us quickly if something is wrong so we can take corrective action without affecting customers. Zabbix is a well-known tool that can do this for you.
Why do we need Application Monitoring?
Information gathering
Large applications produce a lot of data which should be monitored and analysed for product performance and improvement and, thereby, better business.
Monitoring is available around the clock
Humans won’t be able monitor every server 24 X 7. However, it is vital that any untoward incident on the servers be reported immediately and taken care of immediately.
Pre-emptive Alerting
Monitoring tool is an invisible member of your team that will alert you to any unexpected events in the system.
What is Zabbix?
Zabbix is an open-source, real-time, network monitoring tool and application. It allows monitoring of thousands upon thousands of metrics from both physical and virtual machines. Zabbix offers a web-based management interface that is centralized via a database. Zabbix allows visualization of data in the form graphs, screens and maps.
Why choose Zabbix?
Open Source – Zabbix is completely open source and available at no cost.
Active Monitoring – This allows you to easily monitor servers, apps, and network devices, collecting accurate statistics and performance data
Zabbix is Enterprise Ready – Zabbix was designed to scale from small environments up to large environments
Capacity Planning – With the Zabbix data, it will be easy for you to analyze your infrastructure and plan the capacity accordingly.
Zabbix Architecture
Zabbix is a distributed monitoring tool that has a central web interface. Zabbix’s simple architecture can be broken down into three servers.
Web Server
RDBMS Server
Zabbix server
This setup is sufficient to handle large environments. It is better to use a dedicated server for each of these components.
Zabbix uses client/server architecture and has an agent on the servers that need to be monitored. This agent collects all information and status from the system, and sends it to Zabbix server. Zabbix versions 3 and higher support encrypted communication between clients and servers.
The Zabbix server can also receive input data from Zabbix proxy servers or Zabbix senders. Zabbix sender allows you to use a command line utility to send data to Zabbix servers to track application performance and availability. Zabbix proxy is used to monitor remote servers. It can collect performance data and availability data on behalf of Zabbix servers, save it locally, and then send it back to Zabbix server. The proxy servers can then take some of the load and offload Zabbix servers.
Let’s take a look at some terminologies used by Zabbix.
Frontend – Zabbix Web interface
Zabbix Server – Central server for data collection and processing
Zabbix agent – A process that is installed on client servers to monitor local conditions
Host – A networked device which should be monitored
Host group – A logical grouping of hosts. It is used to assign access rights.
Template – A collection of entities (items and triggers, applications, low level discovery rules, graphs screens, web scenarios, etc.) that can be applied to one or more hosts
Item – Data you wish to receive from a host
Trigger – It’s a logical expression that defines a threshold
Event – The occurrence of something that merits attention
Action – Predefined method of reacting