Why choose Zabbix?
If your network is complex enough to manage, you want to choose a solid monitoring tool. I like to look at these criteria when evaluating monitoring solutions: It's not difficult to set up. It doesn't have to be easy, but I don't want a setup that's so complex it makes me dread the task. Consistently presents me with easy to consume data that's normally a bother to get on my own. Flexible when my needs change, and if there's anything I've learned as an Admin, get ready for change. Has an active development cycle with a robust user community. Before [...]
Monitor a Mac’s TimeMachine backups
If your supporting Mac's in your environment, you probably have come across TimeMachine, Apple's answer to backups to a local disk or NAS. While configuring TimeMachine on a Mac is very easy, and good Admin wants to keep track that these backups are actually being run on a regular basis. The problem with this is that Apple doesn't give you a way to easily monitor this. But I went digging, and found a way. TimeMachine does have a utility installed on the Mac, and you can get some data from it into Zabbix, but it's not enough to be really [...]
AWS Throttles Its Customers
I've been working with large files for a few years now. These zip files are normally over a gigabyte and can easily go into the 50-100 gigabyte range. They contain data that can only be compressed to about 50%, so there's no way to make them much smaller - they are what they are. These files need to be uploaded from the field and processed in the cloud, and I've chosen AWS to do the storage via S3 and the processing via EC2. While we've been generally pleased with each, we have seen that AWS throttles data to and [...]
Tuning MySQL’s Innodb for Smaller Sites
Scour the 'net for how to reduce your MySQL server footprint, and you won't find much. Everyone seems to want to beef up its settings, and I've been one of them. When you have a server cluster taking thousands of requests per second, the battle cry is often for more RAM to aid in caching data. But for smaller sites, like a neighborhood hiking club, you will have a very different server setup. Smaller sites will be run on smaller servers with smaller resources. With a server that's only got 4GB of RAM, every megabyte matters. Like any good household [...]
How to monitor Unifi equipment
There's been a lot of talk on the 'net about monitoring Unifi equipment. Unifi is a brand of prosumer networking equipment from a company called Ubiquiti. If you've ever wanted "the good stuff" for your home or office network, make sure to have a look at them, but I digress. One of the drawbacks of Unifi equipment is that they don't publish their SNMP MIBs, so if you're trying to add a Unifi router, switch, access point, etc. into your monitoring system, you're in for a lot of work as you poke about with "snmpwalk" and see what you find. [...]
How to get the “up(1)” to show for a Item’s status value.
In Zabbix, when you poll an Item for a Host, you sometimes get back a numeric "1" (one) or "0" (zero), but you'd like to display it in English. as an Up or Down value. You'll typically see this when you poll a Service on a Host, such as SSH or HTTPS. When defining the Item to check, look for the "Value Mapping" field noted by the red arrow in this Template. Simply select the entry Service State, and then update the Item. When the Item next gets data, often every minute, the new value will look like "up (1)" [...]