Preface

Imagine you're celebrating the start of the weekend with Friday-night drinks with a few friends. And then suddenly, your phone rings—one of the servers you administer has gone down, and it needs to be back up before tomorrow morning. So you drag yourself back to the office, only to discover that some logfiles have been growing more than usual over the past few weeks and have filled up the hard drive. While this scenario is very simplistic, something similar has happened to most IT workers at one or another point in their careers. To avoid such situations, this book will teach you to monitor your network's hardware, servers, and web performance using Zabbix, an open source system monitoring and reporting solution.

This book will guide you through setting up almost every feature in Zabbix. With step-by-step instructions, anybody should be able to configure monitoring. You could even say that this is an idiot's guide to Zabbix—but only because we all have had moments of not understanding something. In order to not leave you confused, throughout this book, I will try to hold your hand, push you forward, and explain everything in so much detail that you won't get frustrated at all.