zabbix

Recently I installed a Zabbix 7.0 proxy on a remote rental FreeBSD virtual server of mine. Why?

To give Zabbix 7.0 proxy some hard time

I do not envy my new proxy. If I would be a piece of software, I really would not want to be it. No, not because it would be challenging -- no, this one must be the most bored proxy of all time. It doesn't have too much to do, other than now it's testing this blog and few other websites instead of my home Raspberry Pi 4 doing that.

As my little monitoring project has outgrown what I at first thought it would be, some time ago I tightened some screws on its backup process -- or, actually, the restore part.

Lately I've been writing so much about GPT4All, synthetic monitoring and ProxySQL that this blog has drifted away from its original scope quite a bit. Let's return to roots for a while -- at least for this post, and see what's new on my home monitoring front. Or, not necessarily new, but details I have not shared with you earlier.

If you have a busy Zabbix system with lots of people using the web interface, perhaps Grafana with complex dashboards connecting to your Zabbix, and many other tasks directly communicating with the database, here's an idea: try out ProxySQL, a yet another nice open source product.

After my few posts about synthetic monitoring over multiple Proton VPN tunnels, it's now time to show some weird widget ideas. I did already show you the standard widgets and panels I made, but how about something that's possible through open source and the fantastic community? The custom widgets really make the observability machine to hum smoothly. This time, I'm showing some Grafana panels to visualize the data gathered by Zabbix.

I was supposed to show you some dashboard creation, but Zabbix 7.0beta2 came out today and of course I had to update to it. The update itself was just as uneventful as I hoped -- with my Raspberry Pi, the whole process went through in about a minute. This blog post is probably among the shortest I have ever made, but the one new feature made me post this immediately. There are other new features like still more performance tuning under the hood, smaller cosmetic changes such as new icons, but the one that got me excited is...

As Zabbix 7.0 gains some enhancements in DNS monitoring, too, let's add to that my synthetic monitoring toolpack theme of the week. I'm not actually sure if my global testing is global in reality, as this is going through Proton VPN. The results look such similar that maybe the tests are using some nearby Proton VPN DNS server... I didn't yet check with Wireshark. Anyway, let's imagine this would work.

As a continuation to my previous global blog HTTP response time monitoring, let's continue with tracerouting. Apart from extremely small modification, for this feature, I cannot take the credit, but it belongs to this guy. It's time to add some fancy mtr data to Zabbix!

My blog has global audience, so would be nice to know how well the site itself is reachable from different points of this planet. In this blog post, I'll setup a very different solution with Zabbix to do that. No remote proxies or agents, just a single home router and a VPN service. 

Also, in this story, I probably found out a small bug from Zabbix web scenarios, or how Zabbix or its agents behaves with them. I will let the Zabbix team to decide.

Now that my (admittedly repetitive) Generative AI blog has been up and running for a while, it's time to give you ideas how to utilize this AI weirdness inside your Zabbix or Grafana, too.

How about an automatically updated alert summary for the next on-call person around the time the shift is about to change? There would be multiple ways of doing that, in my case I did it like this.

Create a cronjob

My cronjob runs the following every hour: