Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

Now that Zabbix rolled out their Zabbix Cloud, of course I rushed in to create a new instance for me. This must be about my quickest blog post ever.

Getting my Zabbix Cloud account was very painless indeed! Few clicks to create an account, within 10-15 minutes I got an e-mail that everything is ready, then few more clicks (like give a name for my instance), wait for the instance to spin up, done! See, it's up:

About one more week to go before Zabbix Summit 2024 kicks off! Currently my speech is scheduled to be on Saturday October 5th 12:20 EEST. If you are not at the Zabbix Summiit, there will be a live YouTube stream of the event you can follow.  

In the previous Zabbix Summits the schedules have been shuffling a bit so the time is still subject to change, but at least for now it's scheduled for that time slot.

Let's get back to monZphere for a moment. One of the custom Zabbix widgets they provide -- AI Insights -- is something completely different.

While checking Zabbix 7.0.4rc1 release notes, I noticed this little change:

... and true enough, git.zabbix.com already has the template available for download. Of course I had to try that out.

Can you monitor your typing speed and accuracy with Zabbix? Of course you can! 

Why?

For some time now, I have felt that the external keyboard I use at home makes me a clumsy typer. Whenever I type with my Linux laptop or Mac keyboard, I feel like I make less typos than with the otherwise comfortable external keyboard.  To make the testing more scientific, time to summon good old typespeed and hook it with Zabbix.

Yesterday Zabbix blog had a fascinating entry on how you can use Zabbix to monitor Zabbix Security Advisories. The blog post does go above and beyond to make sure that everything gets captures planned, and does so by using web scraping and AWS Lambdas, for example. Their solution for sure generates better results than what I'm going to show you, but what I'm offering here is a solution that's 100% produced within Zabbix instead of using any 3rd party code.

Those who follow me on LinkedIn might have noticed already that this morning I mentioned about the recently revamped zabbix-cli. The tool has been rewritten from ground up and now it's really cool thing to use! Here are some examples how I can use it for monitoring my home.

Now it looks cool

It has colours, tables, advanced auto-completion, all kinds of goodies! Below is a short snippet from --help option.

After all Qubes OS and monZphere blogging, let's get closer to original theme of my blog - home monitoring, or monitoring myself.

Zabbix 7.0 API got a nice little history.push method, allowing you to send data to Zabbix over its API. How I'm going to use it? Thanks for asking, I'm going to send the song names of the music I'm listening to. For the sake of simplicity, this entry shows how to send a single value.

As part of my monZphere custom Zabbix modules blogging spree, here comes the next one. This is where things are getting more exciting. What if you could do your Zabbix tasks just by chatting with a friendly chatbot? What if I told you that you can actually do that today?

Here's yet another module by monZphere: Kanban view of your incidents. 

Standard Zabbix Problems view

Before going on to how it looks like, here's the standard Problems view in Zabbix, in case you would not have used Zabbix.