Introduction is open-source monitoring software for networks and applications. It offers real-time monitoring of thousands of metrics collected from servers, virtual machines, and any other kind of network device. These metrics can help you determine the current health of your IT infrastructure and detect problems with hardware or software components before customers complain. Useful information is stored in a database so you can analyze data over time and improve the quality of provided services, or plan upgrades of your equipment. Zabbix uses a client-server architecture and uses a small agent on the monitored client to gather data and send it to the Zabbix server. Zabbix version 3 supports encrypted communication between the server and connected clients, so your data is protected while it travels over insecure networks. The Zabbix server stores its data in a relational database powered by MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle. It also provides a web interface so you can view data and configure system settings. In this tutorial, we will configure two machines. One will be configured as the server, and the other as a client which you'll monitor. The server will use a MySQL database to record monitoring data and use Apache to serve the web interface. You can set these up by following this. Follow to configure those on one of your servers. Step 1 — Installing the Zabbix Server First, we need to install the Zabbix Server on the server where we installled MySQL, Apache, and PHP. Zabbix is available in Ubuntu's package manager, but it's outdated, so we'll use the official Zabbix repository to install the latest stable version. Setting up zabbix-release 3. Step 2 — Configuring the MySQL Database For Zabbix We need to create a new MySQL database and populate it with some basic information in order to make it suitable for Zabbix. We'll also create a specific user for this database so Zabbix isn't logging into MySQL with the root account. Exit out of the database console. The Zabbix installation provided us with a file that sets this up for us. Run the following command to set up the schema and import the data into the zabbix database. We'll use zcat since the data in the file is compressed. This command will not output any errors if it was successful. If you see the error ERROR 1045 28000 : Access denied for user 'zabbix' 'localhost' using password: YES then make sure you used the password for the zabbix user and not the root user. In order for the Zabbix server to use this database, you need to set the database password in the Zabbix server configuration file. Comment this line if no password is used. We need to set the DBPassword value in the file to the password for our database user. Step 3 — Configuring PHP For Zabbix The Zabbix web interface is written in PHP and requires some special PHP server settings. The Zabbix installation process created an Apache configuration file that contains these settings. We need to make a small change to this file, so open it up. The only change you need to make is to set the appropriate timezone, which is commented out by default. You can use this to find the right one for you. Then save and close the file. Now restart Apache to apply these new settings. Now let's set up the web frontend. Step 4 — Configuring Settings for the Zabbix Web Interface The web interface lets us see reports and add hosts that we want to monitor, but it needs some initial setup before we can use it. On the first screen, you will see a welcome message. Click Next step to continue. On the next screen, you will see the table that lists all of the prerequisites to run Zabbix. All of the values in this table must be OK, so verify that they are. Be sure to scroll down and look at all of the prerequisites. Once you've verified that everything is ready to go, click Next step to proceed. The next screen asks for database connection information. We told the Zabbix server about our database, but the Zabbix web interface also needs access to the database to manage hosts and read data. Therefore enter the MySQL credentials you configured in Step 2 and click Next step to proceed. On the next screen, you can leave the options at their default values. The Name is optional; it is used in the web interface to distinguish one server from another in case you have several monitoring servers. Click Next step to proceed. The next screen will show the pre-installation summary so you can confirm everything is correct. Click Next step to proceed to the final screen. The web interface setup is complete! Click Finish to proceed to the login screen. The default user is Admin and the password is zabbix. Before we log in, let's set up the Zabbix agent on our other server. Step 5 — Installing and Configuring the Zabbix Agent Now we need to configure the agent software that will send monitoring data to the Zabbix server. You will need it to configure the host. First you have to edit the IP address of the Zabbix server. Incoming connections will be accepted only from the hosts listed here. If IPv6 support is enabled then '127. Used for active checks. Our agent is now ready to send data to the Zabbix server. But in order to use it, we have to link to it from the server's web console. Step 6 — Adding the New Host to Zabbix Server Installing an agent on a server we want to monitor is only half of the process. Each host we want to monitor needs to be registered on the Zabbix server, which we can do through the web interface. When you have logged in, click on the Configuration, and then Hosts in the top navigation bar. Then click Create host button in the top right corner of the screen. This will open the host configuration page. Adjust the Host name and IP ADDRESS to reflect the host name and IP address of your client machine. Then add the host to a group by selecting one of the groups from the list, or by creating your own group. The host can be in multiple groups. The Linux Servers group is a good default choice. Once you've added the group, click the Templates tab. Type Template OS Linux in the Search field and then click Add to add this template to the host. Next, navigate to Encryption tab. Select PSK for both Connections to host and Connections from host. Then set PSK identity to PSK 001, which is the value of the TLSPSKIdentity setting of the Zabbix agent we configured previously. Then set PSK value to the key you generated for the Zabbix agent. Finally, click the Add button at the bottom of the form to create the host. You will see your new host with green labels indicating that everything is working fine and the connection is encrypted. After several seconds you can navigate to Monitoring and then Latest data to see the data from your agent. To ensure things are working, shut down your monitored server so you can see how Zabbix alerts you to problems. Once your monitored server is offline you will see the warning on the main dashboard: If you have additional servers you need to monitor, log in to each host, install the Zabbix agent, generate a PSK, configure the agent, and add the host to the web interface following the same steps you followed to add your first host. Conclusion In this tutorial, you learned how to set up a simple and secure monitoring solution which will help you monitor the state of your servers. It can now warn you of problems, and you have the opportunity to plot some graphs based on the obtained data so you can analyze it and plan accordingly.
