I wrote about Zabbix Installation for Layman sometimes back and really recommended it
for all system administrators out there, due to its simplicity, flexibility and promising nature about lots of aspects.
But now days, look like myself in deep troubles with the same. I am getting strange kind of problems with well established setups of Zabbix, when no one has altered any kind of configuration that is really very very strange. May be my knowledge about this product is lesser; may be reason is just that I am unable to find any proper book over it; may be the manual itself is one of worse, one could come across. Reason might be any of them or all of them, but its getting really unstable for me. It works perfectly after installation for sometime, but gets unstable soon as data grows. I am just finding one different thing in my environment that our servers run 9 AM-9PM, not 24 hours, but this should be the reason for any standard product. Or it might be something happened behind my back, when I was on leave for 3-4 days. Whatever the reasons might be, I am not able to trace it until now.
Listing here some of the issues I am facing with it, which are yet unexplained/ unresolved:
Problem 1: High Dependency on Local Time :- The first problem, I faced with Zabbix was, its going completely out of tune if somehow local time of the server get altered by any means. I tried even network time, but just of no use. You are left to pray about this only. Its been an issue since long and I have seen warnings about it manuals and books.
I really think that it should have been fixed till now (means some kind of automatic handling or making server time synced with clients etc). If you were offering this solution to corporate as along this ‘bug’ makes it completely unreliable.
Problem 2: Broken graphs later on as Data increases :- I am really not sure about this problem, but its making me low on confidence in front of management about this product. I am getting really many strange scenarios with it. The biggest Zabbix Server of mine was taking care of around 25-30 servers and this was going awry again and again. Like I am getting data in latest data tab correctly, I am getting data in 4 hours and 8 hours graphs correctly, but getting no graphs in 1 hour and 2 hours graphs, while its showing data but no lines on graph.
Searching through forums say that it might due to much data in MySQL tables and MySQL might be needed to be retuned. But I don’t think that such an application would not be able to handle a mere 2 dozen servers for even straight 7 days. No disk space issue (100 GB free), No Memory Issue (1 GB RAM), processor is Core 2 Duo, have enabled house cleanup, have increased the memory limits, but still….
Problem 3: No support as I am unable to find any person, who knows this software a bit more. Look like most of the people using more worse NagiOS only. Professionals require contract for support and forums are not that useful as its not a simple piece of application and problems are of diverse nature… literally too many. Logs are confusing and most of the time not that much info even on setting it on debug mode.
My aim of this post is not to criticize Zabbix itself here, but its support is really poor and many things not that explained in forums and manuals. Much hard to find anyone, who knows it through.
Currently looking for someone, who might be dealing with Zabbix in his environment and could offer help out of the way. I want to invite all who know a thing or two about Zabbix to share the knowledge with me and same will be with myself.
Nitish Kumar
Nitish Kumar's Blog 
i am the one who learn zabbix 1.8 too. hope to learn something from you.
If you wish to go with the latest then best way is to have a fresh installation and following the one click install
http://blog.brendon.com/unix/installing-zabbix-18x-on-centos-the-easy-way/
Best installation practice, you will come across. As about customizations, then I am always here for help. 🙂
i had installed it on freebsd anyway. i have problem to configure the email.
you need either own mail server or some third party one. If want to configure an own one, then could use the info at
http://www.linuxmail.info/
but note that any local mail server wont be able to send mails to any internet mail provider as they would be blocking the mail as spam.
If wish to use third party one, then search with that way
Outstanding post however , I was wondering if you could wriite
a litte more on this subject? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit more.
Bless you!
very informative blogs. I am a Zabbix newbie, installed server on local private cloud (no public ip) and want to use this server to monitor machines (public) outside our local network. I have not been able to make a connection between private Zabbix server & external agent (public machine). Tried to run following command on server
$ zabbix_get -s xx.xxx.xxx.xx -p 10050 -k “agent.verison”
zabbix_get [5479]: Get value error: ZBX_TCP_READ() failed: [104] Connection reset by peer
What I understood from Zabbix manual is that agent can be configured as passive agent which will be polled by Zabbix server. If that is true, why is server IP required in zabbix_agentd.conf??
Please help. Thanks!