Why monitoring?
There are no perfect IT systems that do their job reliably and without errors. A functioning IT system is not a state, but a process that must be permanently accompanied by people (administrators).
Numerous events repeatedly cause an IT system to fail. Wear parts such as hard disks, faulty operation, malicious attacks or the failure to perform regular maintenance tasks are just some of the reasons why errors and failures occur. And at the latest when your customer notices that a system no longer works faster than you do, you need monitoring.
A monitoring system should perform the following tasks for you:
Enter the status of all components
Preparing, sorting and evaluating data
present clearly arranged summaries
Detect deviations from normal condition
give the alarm
Log states and changes
Monitor and log compliance with processes or a deviation
Monitoring is more than just an alarm in the event of an error
The larger an IT system is, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of the status of the entire system and all individual components. Accordingly, the monitoring system must perform more complex tasks than those described above.
Sending an alarm when an error occurs is an important but far from the only task of a monitoring system. Monitoring means collecting a lot of data and automatically drawing the right conclusions. If a component fails, it is not difficult to conclude that there is a problem! Someone should take care of it! From a certain number of systems, messages from the monitoring system are part of everyday life. The monitoring system should be able to distinguish harmless from serious errors and use different media for notification, depending on the degree of severity.
In addition to the detection of faults, a monitoring system should make conclusions or concrete statements about the reliability of systems and components possible. This requires the storage of historical data. The system should provide an interface and a so-called user interface in order to be able to evaluate the stored data quickly and conveniently.
What does Zabbix do?
Zabbix LLC describes its product as "Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution." In concrete terms, this statement means the following:
Zabbix is Enterprise!
The software is designed for professional use in business-critical areas. The functionality covers everything that professional administrators and entire teams need. Zabbix developers attach particular importance to the support of almost all operating systems, a robust software core and an understandable operation with a modern graphical interface.
Zabbix is Open Source!
The software is released completely under the GPL. You can download Zabbix for free and install it as often as you like. No matter how many hosts you monitor. There are no royalties due. And if you want, you can view and modify the source code of Zabbix.
Zabbix is for large environments!
If you only want to monitor a single server, then use Zabbix to literally shoot at sparrows with cannons. Zabbix is designed for use in networks. Monitoring several thousand hosts is no problem. Techniques such as proxies and nodes can be used to monitor large networks and at different locations.
Zabbix Download Link: https://www.zabbix.com/download
Zabbix Community : https://www.zabbix.com/forum
