5 Quick Start Guide
1 Login
This is “Welcome to Zabbix” screen. When installed, use user name Admin with password zabbix to connect as Zabbix superuser.
When logged in, you will see “Connected as Admin” in the lower right corner of the page and access to Configuration and Administration areas will be granted:
1.1 Protection against brute force attacks
In case of five consecutive failed login attempts, Zabbix interface will pause for 30 seconds in order to prevent brute force and dictionary attacks.
IP address of a failed login attempt will be displayed after successful login.
2 Add user
After initial installation, Zabbix has only two users defined. User “Admin” is a Zabbix superuser, which has full permissions. User “guest” is a special default user. If a user does not log in, the user will be accessing Zabbix with “guest” permissions. By default, “guest” has no permissions on Zabbix objects.
To add a new user, navigate to Administration → Users and switch to Users in the dropdown, then click “Create User”.
In the new user form, make sure to add your user to one of the existing groups, for example Network administrators.
By default, new users have no media (notification methods) defined. To create one, click Add in the Media section.
In this popup, enter an e-mail address for the user. You can specify a time period when the medium will be active (see Time period specification page for description of the format), by default a medium is always active. You can also customise severities for which the medium will be active, but leave all of them enabled for now. Click Add, then click Save in the user properties. The new user appears in the userlist.
By default, a new user has no permissions. To grant the user rights, click on the group in Groups column. This opens the group properties form. This user will have read-only access to Linux servers group, so click on Add below the Read only listbox.
In this popup, mark the checkbox next to Linux servers, then click Select.
In the user group properties form, click Save.
Done! You may try to log in using credentials of the new user.
3 Email settings
Initially, Zabbix has several predefined notification delivery methods (media types). Email is one of those. Email configuration can be found under Menu → Administration → Media types.
Click on Email in the list of pre-defined media types.
Set correct SMTP server, SMTP helo and SMTP email values. Press Save when ready.
Now you have media type “Email” defined. A media type must be linked with users, otherwise it will not be used.
4 Monitoring an agent-enabled host
The section provides details about monitoring a host which has Zabbix agent running. You must have the agent installed and configured properly.
4.1 Monitoring default Zabbix server
Open Configuration → Hosts to see the list of currently defined hosts. The situation will be different depending on Zabbix version being used.
-
If you are using Zabbix up to version 1.8.3, you will see single disabled host, Zabbix server.
-
If you are using Zabbix appliance version 1.8.3 or later, you will see single enabled host, Zabbix server.
If the host is not monitored, click on Not monitored in the Status column and confirm the popup. That's it, we don't have to do anything else – if agent and server daemons are running properly, the host will be monitored from now on.
4.2 Monitoring a different server
Open Configuration → Hosts to see the list of currently defined hosts. There will be one pre-defined host, but now we want to add another one.
Click on Create host. As the minimum, host definition for our purposes should have the following defined:
-
Host name;
-
Host must belong to at least one hostgroup;
-
For passive Zabbix agent monitored hosts IP address should be defined;
-
For a quickstart, we will use one of the pre-defined templates as well.
Other options will suit us with their defaults.
Host name
-
Enter a host name here. Alpha-numericals, spaces and underscores are allowed.
Groups
-
Host must belong to at least one host group. Move groups from the right hand side box to the left hand side box and the opposite until you are satisfied with the result.
IP address
-
Enter the IP address of the host. Note that Zabbix agent daemon must have Zabbix server IP address specified in its configuration file Server directive.
Linked templates
-
On the right hand side block Linked templates, click on the Add button, choose Templates in the Group dropdown, then mark checkbox next to Template_Linux entry (assuming the newly added host is running Linux) and click on Select.
When done, click Save.
The host should be successfully created. Click on Details in the upper left corner of the resulting page – that should show you what actually happened.
According to the details, the effect of using a template should be that this new host now has entities from Template_Linux – let's verify that. In the Group dropdown, choose one of the groups you added your new host to. That should show a high level configuration overview of this host.
4.3 Verifying current configuration
In this list we can see that several items, triggers and graphs supposedly have been added to our new host.
Let's make sure that this host indeed has those items. Click on Items next to it.
Looks like items have been added successfully. Note the Template_Linux text in gray prefixing them, which indicates which template do the entities come from. What about triggers? Looking above the item list, there's a horizontal strip which allows to easily navigate between different entity categories of a host.
In there, click on Triggers.
Great – triggers also seem to be in place (the above screenshot only shows part of the output, though). There was also something about graphs – using the host bar above the trigger list navigate to custom graph configuration.
Here we can see that some templated custom graphs are available as well.
Now it is time to see what information is available. Go to Menu→Latest data and expand some category in there.
The values are being gathered and displayed along with change information, if any.
In Zabbix, for all numeric items a graph can be obtained without any configuration at all – these graphs are generated on runtime. To view such a graph, click on Graph link next to any item.
You can change the currently displayed time period using the controls above the graph.
Feel free to explore other areas that display monitoring information, including:
-
Monitoring → Graphs for custom graphs;
-
Monitoring → Triggers for a list of currently active problems;
-
Monitoring → Dashboard for a high level overview;
-
Monitoring → Maps for network maps;
-
Monitoring → Screens for compound pages showing several elements at once.
After having the basic monitoring in place, we might want to actually notify on situation changes, which we'll set up in the next section.
5 Set up notifications
We have a host or several hosts monitored. We can see simple and custom graphs, as well as data for individual items. We also have problem conditions, called triggers, set up, and they are changing from OK to PROBLEM state and back as situation changes. While we can look at the data to determine the current status, it is not feasible to do so all the time – which means we will want to set up notifications. To do this, open Configuration → Actions.
By default, there are no actions configured. To create one, click Create Action. In the upcoming form, enter a name for the action. In the most simple case, if we don't add any conditions, action will be used upon any trigger change from OK to PROBLEM and vice versa. We still should define what the action should do – and that is done in the Action operations block. Click on New in that block, which opens new operation configuration form. Here, choose Single user in the Send message to dropdown, then click on Select. In the upcoming popup, choose the user we created before.
Notice how the e-mail address we specified for that user will be used here.
Macros (or variables) {TRIGGER.NAME} and {STATUS}, currently visible in the Default subject and Default message fields, will be replaced with trigger name and trigger status, respectively. Trigger status will be either PROBLEM or OK. Click Add in the Edit operation block.
We are done with the simple action configuration, so click Save in the Action block.
Congratulations – we are done with the simple setup of monitoring some host and sending out notifications based on problem condition definitions.
Data source: Zabbix