 all right we are here with go ahead I don't want to say your name wrong it's just an inventory so not that complicated no not too complicated and you used to work directly for Zavix is that correct that's absolutely true I have worked for the Zavix company well basically two and a half years okay so you have a lot of direct insight into everything about how Zavix works not just from a external user side but from a developer side as well that's true like when I started to work in a Zavix two and a half years ago I didn't have any experience with it I basically before I started to work I just Google what Zavix is and then I found out that hey this is a monitoring tool open source tool so okay and for the two and a half years in the company it's like really a lot of experience not only just technical stuff but also a lot of travel a lot of use cases all around the world different companies and stuff like that I use Zavix myself and I guess we should probably have started with this but let's talk about what Zavix is it's a monitoring tool would be the short description but give me a little bit more depth on description of well the sales and marketing pitch they give for it all the monitoring tool yes indeed it is like pretty simple explanation what it is but what I find very good inside as Zavix and why personally I choose the Zavix for my own is first of all it's open source so it's absolutely free you don't have to pay any money to use the Zavix and most frequent question is like yeah right like where's the catch so we get a demo version for free and how much do we need to pay for full functionality none it's all absolutely free all the functionalities Zavix currently has is available for free you can go download install and start using it then the flexibility I had a chance to try and do a research on multiple monitoring softwares I won't call the names like the top five of currently available and they're pretty friendly for the users and I would say that the most important thing there is that there's a lot of things available from the box like let's say you want to monitor I don't know network or some cloud environments Azure AWS something like that yeah just go in the front end click add new and you add some fields and you're done in the Zavix it's more about customizations so use there will be a lot of things available from the box like the same as an MP stuff and and also the VMware but if you have something like really specific and you need a way how to monitor that you can customize the Zavix you can write your own scripts and any programming languages you know there's no restrictions you can use bash CC plus plus Python whatever else and and even PowerShell on Windows and just integrate it with Zavix so there's a lot of use cases from not a standard point of view what you can monitor what people are doing and I guess we can talk about it a bit later well and I would turn me on as abix the same thing you said it's open-source and I should mention it's cross-platform so you can actually use this to monitor your Windows servers and your application servers so I'm using it and I don't know everything I do is pretty straightforward and standard so all the monitoring I'm doing with Zavix for our own infrastructure the basic out-of-the-box scripts work perfectly fine I needed to monitor my web servers make sure they're all up and running I needed to monitor a couple little applications like SQL works fine for that and I haven't monitoring my free NAS storage servers and it keeps an eye on those and lets me know if they're under too much load or anything like that so I found the the basics of Zavix really simple to get going on in you know then you can do that deeper dive later and that's actually why I used to have a YouTube channel in part of the reason we're talking about this because you have a channel where you take a lot of those deeper dives into the API into the customization of Zavix and some of the real intricate inner workings of it true about a YouTube channel like I started it when when I already left the Zavix company and and the main idea of the channel was first of all I always knew that there's simply not enough stuff how to and manuals and information about this monitoring platform available in the internet if you would just search for Zavix or some tutorials you will find something but it's actually not enough and why it a lot of times you will be left on your own which are problems so you will have to search for the forums wait when somebody will answer you but you won't be able to find any any useful information in the internet so the idea was to create something like a centralized and in this case it is a YouTube channel where I am trying to explain would not be correct to say how to do specific things like monitor Cisco something something but to explain the logic how the thing works because that's also pretty often thing that is happening let's say you found a community made template or or some solution to monitor some custom stuff you download the template imported in the front end pointed to the device and it's not working because it was made for one of the previous versions or or something else is changed so in my channel I'm trying to explain the base lines the logic and ideas so after watching the videos the main idea of it is so you would be able to create your templates on your own or your your stuff and I like that a lot because that's something that's important is not just understanding and I think more technicians should dive deeper like oh the tool didn't work well if you didn't understand how the tool worked it's hard to solve problems because like you said there's firmware updates so you bought you got a Cisco template to monitor a Cisco box but it was designed based on an older version of firmware a new firmware changed the setting so I have any understanding helps it helped me because I had to solve little things like Freenast there wasn't a template that I liked and the new version of Freenast had an error but understanding how to monitor how to modify a template threshold fixed the problem right away as I was getting you know false flag alerts in which any learning system you don't want to ever just ignore alerts you want to make sure it's well tuned so you you don't want to get in the habit of ignoring it because then you'll ignore the the major alert that comes through and one of the other things that I also have a video in my channel is pretty often we're talking about how to monitor the same Cisco software or some Windows servers whatever but we don't talk about the logic of monitoring itself how should we configure the triggers what should be the thresholds what are the correct values or parameters for them what is the value that we can get from our monitoring and because of a lot of people's people don't know these things and they just throw a lot of the templates they download everything they can get in the internet upload in the Zabix point to all of their devices in their environment then they're getting 1000 alerts each day and eventually they just start to ignore all of them and after one year you will ask hey guys do you have some monitoring environment and they're like well yeah but what's the point we're just getting spammed with a lot of alerts so I'm also trying to explain what should be those thresholds and why so you don't want to get a false positives and at the same time you should not get in the false negatives so when you receive an email you should directly know that yes currently there is a problem it's not a false positive it's not something that I could perhaps ignore there's definitely a problem and I need to check it or perhaps fix it you know and I've covered this even when I talk about things like intrusion detection tools and it applies to so many different tools there's always a little pain and you just have to start with that going you're gonna have to determine some baselines for your environment so the thresholds you run in a these free nesting example in Zabix the amount of jails I was running was causing it to have a process trigger easy enough to solve because I knew the system was working perfectly fine so I just adjusted it to match my environment going I run this many jails which has this many processes so I'm not overloading the processes the template thinks I am but once you tuned it it only alerts me owners an actual problem now and that's way better yeah absolutely and also one of the most frequent questions for let's say potential users of not only Zabix but any monitoring tool is like hey what should we monitor that that's actually very complicated question because for me I can tell you like the basic stuff the stuff that should be monitored on any devices any computers any softwares like the CB usage disk processes network traffic and stuff like that but there will always be something very specific for each company and only you know that you need to monitor that and pretty often even even the managers are not the guys who know that yes that indeed is what we need so you as a technical guy usually have to figure out on its own like quite recently I had a task we had to monitor Wi-Fi devices in the office and the main problem was that sometimes the Wi-Fi box was not giving IP from was not assigning automatically IP and you could not know that by simply checking the network speed or something like that so we ended up just writing a small poor shell script that basically was performing a connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot then checking does it has a proper IP reporting like success or false then disconnecting releasing IP and doing that like each five minutes or ten depends so then yeah you can you can really know that it is working and this is something that's really neat inside as Abix is okay it's easy to check port 80 to say does my web server respond but if that response is some type of database error it's still responded and it still shows up but your customers can't get to your site and this is where I've noticed was Abix you have some easy customization like you can perform some type of sanity check and say I pull this data verify that this data equals what I expect it to equal like landed on a specific page and Zabix can then monitor from that that way we know it's serving up the page properly not just responding on port 443 or port 80 yeah from the the functionality that is available from the box accept a simple port check you can also perform a HTTP HTTP code and also the strings on the page yes you can perform more complex scenarios so in a simple example with the forum you first of all can check a landing page is does the string exist HTTP code is 200 okay let's perform a login with the credentials and the passwords check again some of this information let's try to post something check was the post successful and then you can see a lot of graphs like the response time the speed and yeah evaluate the performance of your web page and aside of this was available from the box but again example from the experience the company that is providing web page and the web page is running a movies like Netflix or something like that you can get a page with HTTP code 200 and and there will be some string but how can you know that the video is actually playing maybe there's just a black screen and what they did in that case just wrote a custom script that basically was taking a screenshots of the video area and if it was always black for like five or ten seconds then obviously there's something wrong that's me only thing yeah they had an issues with some some videos or movies with a long dark intros positives but still that's like a lot better than nothing yeah and this is where it gets interesting is like you said in when you set this up on a schedule like every let's say every ten minutes we check the performance of a web server we measure those response times then you create a trigger in Zavix to say when a response time exceeds this threshold but on the same side it's logging all this so if you want to see the historic performance you can then start using that data aggregated together and Zavix has really slick graphs you can create and those graphs then tell a story of okay this is one it gets close to a threshold during these hours so maybe I need to do something different or this is when we have the most users on it it's kind of cool because it is collecting all the historic data which helps you make decisions going forward that's an I think another important aspect of Zavix is once you have all these everyone likes charts but we talk we got to talk about the action created for them so once you have this this is one of the things I look at okay when is my servers getting the most load do I need to think about adding more memory because I run forum servers and as the forums have gotten busier it's one of the things I have Zavix actually monitoring it's great I can just snapshot my forums going okay CPU use is getting the high easy enough to modify the VM and add one more CPU to it exactly and also vice versa so first of all the storage of history I usually divide all the monitoring part to the monitoring stuff in like three parts first of all we're monitoring the data then we have triggers which are analyzing our incoming data and notifying about the problems or trying to fix them with the pre-configured remote commands and then there's the last part getting used off the data that we collected and the user is in charge to figure out for how long he wants to keep the data he may keep it for like two weeks if he has limited space available on the server or for two years if he wants to keep an insight about the data he may choose to keep a history for two months and keep the trends for five years it will save a lot of the disk space but it will still keep an insight about the data and trend basically is minimal maximal and average value from one item in one hour period then how we can how we can use the data you told about like looking on your servers like yeah there's the CPU spiking so I should add some CPU power or the vice versa is let's say you have one year of the data for performance of your servers and how that usually happens when you deploy a new servers you don't know how much CPU power or memory you need so you just basically figure out something and add plus 20% let's say after one year you see that hey I can actually take those 20% away and I will save some money from nothing because well my server it's not utilizing even 30 40% of what I what I throw on it you know I've seen this a lot with people who they audit they you know the previous IT people who given like full blanket like put it all in the cloud but like you said you run into you go wait a minute you're paying for all the CPU time but you're not really using it so it can be a cost-saving measure another thing you touched on that I think is really important is I like the fact that you can have actions more than notifications you can script actions because the ultimate in a real if you're really good at DevOps and you're really doing your job right you create a self-healing infrastructure and some Zavix can help orchestrate that because you can say all right these are the triggers and that's not just notifying me you can like you said kick off a script to help remediate a problem and I think that's something kind of an interesting aspect I know that some of the functionality of Zavix can help remediate the issues that correct that's true but the functionality is there but I always suggest to be careful with it yeah careful when you think on what events what alerts you should use those automated commands the perfect example where you should do that is a Windows service you're monitoring all of the Windows services and there's a lot of them you don't create them manually there's a low-level discovery running that is automatically discovering all the services creating an items and triggers then let's say Zavix notices that the service is stopped do you really need to send the email or mobile text message to your admin or instead you should immediately try to start the service just use the pre-configured remote command to start the service then continue the monitoring if that didn't help and services still stopped only then escalate the problem to your administrator or create a ticket but this is the case when you can do that but let's say a free disk space also one of the most frequent alerts and events that is happening free disk space on drive C is less than I don't know five percent or right we can send an alert we can notify our admin where we can run a remote command to delete some kind of the folders it will work it will delete it but think about what will happen if somebody some users will place something important so do you want to delete it automatically or do you want some human to well basically check it and just verify that yeah it's safe to delete this stuff yeah there's like you said there's really good examples of when you shouldn't shouldn't and this also you should never turn any of that type of automation on until you've cleared out any false alerts because you don't want false alerts causing triggers to take action and just breaking more things you're actually going to create a disaster for yourself doing it that way sure there's also a lot of testing you can do and I've reminded people about this because they're like well how do I know what's working there's other tools you can do and I've done this to trigger Zavix like after I set up the monitoring there's it's a called stress and most of our infrastructure is Linux so I just run the stress tool which pins the CPU which then tells Zavix go hey I see the CPU pinned over here and so there's also some you know testing you can do to help mitigate this you can simulate some of the problems and that's also probably an important part of your testing procedures how do you simulate problems definitely simulate them you know fill up put a giant file on the C drive see how Zavix handles it see how those notices are so it's all part of the testing process before you ever get to the automation process of fixing the problem you can definitely simulate the problem and also important that you can simulate and check all the checks that you're adding to the Zavix because for for the people that are just beginning with the Zavix and monitoring software of course there will make mistakes you might create an item and let's say that item should check the the value the the host two times a day I've set up an item now I will wait for six hours and then it will become not supported because I made a mistake so I changed something and then I again have to wait for six hours instead it's pretty important to understand that Zavix basically utilizes most of the utilities that are available on the Linux machine on the servers if we're talking about a cnmp stuff well it's just a cnmp get yeah if we're talking about a Zavix agent you don't have to play with an items inside the front end you can use a small utility called a Zavix get that will perform the check from the agent manually oh what else database monitoring and I'm talking not about the database as an engine but a database data monitoring that's just iSQL that's odbc and you can run it from the cli on your Linux machine get the proper proper parameters verify that everything works and just then add an item inside the Zavix yeah it's it's really nice I really I'll touch on a Zavix agent the agents are really nice and I like the cross compatibility because if you have a system that has an older version of Zavix even though I'm running the latest which is for the four series right here 2019 if the client because of what was built into them has an older version of Zavix client it seems to work perfectly fine and Zavix seems to be good about supporting the older versions of the tools as well well the life cycle policy is pretty simple the last long-term support version was 3.0 then we had 3.2 3.4 which has from my opinion quite a lot of super great functionality and one of the best again from my opinion is a pre-processing of the values it really saves a lot of time now the latest version LTS long-term support is 4.0 and basically those previous 3.2 stopped the support when 3.4 was released 3.4 stopped the support when 4.0 was released right but since we talked about agents those are backwards compatible yes the only change that happened in the release of 4.0 was the change in the header of the communication from the components and right now let's say before it was a common thing let's say you have a server of 3.0 something and you could install 3.4 agents because there was just latest release of development so probably more stable probably some bugs were fixed and that was okay right now since 4.0 when the header has changed and it is mandatory now so if you have 3.0 server and you will install an agent of 4.0 the passive checks will not work all active right yeah it's always better to keep it up today but i like that there's that compatibility in there the other thing i'll touch on too is i really like and i don't know what other projects have done this but because i use pf sense i noticed it and they have the latest agents in there pf sense will act as both a zavix has the zavix agent as a plugin and it has a can act as a zavix proxy for connections and that's actually built right in to their plugin system which i thought was great and they actually support both versions they have the three series and the four series so you can load the latest but if there's some use case you have for the three series they're available through their plugins as well it makes monitoring pf sense way easy because it already has all the stuff just set up inside of it to talk to zavix you just turn the plugin on drop the settings in and away you go that's well i guess that's the good thing from the open source products not the database not that any users are trying to make some some money in on this stuff a lot of community members are creating a lot of stuff complicated stuff the scripts templates and just publishing it so take it use it yeah that's a neat feature though there's an in for those of you that don't know there's an entire sharing hub of people sharing all these free templates that zavix has so there's like basically like a marketplace so to speak where you can download all these different free templates that people created for all kinds of different scenarios i think there's things in there for like free pbx and esterix monitoring for phone systems there's just like so many of them they're all categories and organized uh on there so i think that's a great feature yeah there's well the web pages share dot zavix dot com and it's called marketplace kind of but it's free yeah it's free yeah marketplace is it implies there's a cost so there's not it's uh open source and if you want to it's kind of it's uh in in in the gist of open source you can essentially take someone's template fork it and make it your own on there and then republish like your version of it too as i notice there's sometimes competing versions which is kind of cool because someone monitors it this way with these triggers and other people may monitor this way with these triggers so there's a there's a lot of great information it was a good it was a lot of insight looking at that and learning from it yeah but at the same time we talked about this before be careful when you are using community-made templates that's an open source product that's a community-made stuff and this company doesn't take any responsibility about it and we cannot assure you that it will work because well it was made by somebody we don't know who and just read when you go to the share.zabbix.com let's say you found a template for some device you are looking for there will always also be information about supported versions of the Zabbix and if the template was designed by somebody for version 2.4 and you'll try to import it in 4.0 well most likely it will not work right and the nice thing is the templates themselves i mean this is all open source they're just a series of like the jr code and so if you get a little even the most basic understanding you can follow through these and go okay this is what it's doing these are the thresholds these are the things it was set so it's all open source you're not downloading any type of weird binary blob that's the nice thing about how these templates work they're very i found them pretty easy to read you can look through them go okay i understand you can walk through it and understand what it's doing and what it's asking other servers the template is basically just an xml file yeah and if you let it that you will find simply parameters of Zabbix like the item description name and stuff like that yeah so they're easy enough to follow through yeah the title of the share dot zabbix.com there's like really really a lot of stuff in the github you can find a lot of integrations not only like the monitoring templates but also integrations with the ticketing systems one-way integration two-way integration with the cloud environments raspberry stuff a lot of different things and i don't remember it was i think you should search for the monitoring artist and the github the guy made like a global search of zabbix stuff wow there's basically one search field and you enter to your keyword and it searches across all the github i believe or even some some other stuff if i can find that i'll leave that in the description below so maybe you can find that we'll leave in a description of the video here yeah so that's great um so i'm going to leave links to your channel because if you want more in-depth way more than i covered i have my basic getting share with zabbix from my use case but Demetri's way more of an expert on it and his videos can help you really get a better understanding and set some of this stuff up and you know get a better uh more well-rounded zabbix education there's a lot to learn but i find it very worth it i'm been watching some of the videos too so i'll be i'll be bringing them up and i'm gonna tweet out some of them as well i'm trying yeah and uh all the main ideas to not only make like really technical stuff i'm trying just as i said talk about the idea of what would be correct what would be wrong and what's the possible benefits of doing that yeah so well i'm just trying to post the videos in most cases two times a week that's what i'm capable of currently and uh yeah we'll just talk about about a monitoring stuff yeah no i you know i can really appreciate that it's one of those um i started doing these firewall videos and things that's how i even got my starting youtube is covering way more in-depth rather than these more basic product reviews and i think there's obviously proven to be a big market for that so it's uh it's exciting you know and especially because it's near and dear to my heart because it's open source i like teaching people a lot of this stuff and there's a lot like you said you can just grab this tool you can grab sabbix or free you can download you have all the source code um their installers are great they even have pre-compiled live CDs where you can just test without knowing much at all to get started with it so i'll leave links to of course sabbix and any of the marketplaces and links to demetri channel here if you have questions or whatever we'll continue this discussion over on the forums i'll leave a link to our forums as well any any other any other thoughts here demetri well well just about the links yeah about uh sabbix.com page just recently there was well not that recently anymore like more than a half a year ago the new web page with added a new design and aside from the documentation which well in my opinion that's one of the greatest documentation that i ever seen you can indeed find everything and you can just copy paste most of the stuff inside your cli and it will work but in the new web page when you click the download button if you figure out that you want to try sabbix on your virtual machine there will be indeed step by step what you need to copy how to install the repo how to install the packages deploy database create a database imports hema and stuff all of those things it basically takes like 15 20 minutes to deploy sabbix from the scratch on the begin so and i followed the instructions on both how to set up sabbix from the page it is great just like you said you can just copy paste it and it works also the encryption between it their documentation on how to set up the encryption between the agents was spot on the documentation is like you said very extensive you can spend a lot of time reading the manual but it's it's well documented and well organized so definitely tons of information plus some videos to better explain even some of the aspects of it so this will help you get started with sabbix all right thanks okay thank you and goodbye everybody thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe youtube will send you a notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to laurancesystems.com where we offer both business it services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion further head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel and once again thanks again for watching this video and see you next time