Frequently Asked Questions

See this list in the zabbix documentation.
We don't use all of those, so it depends on the roles your server has assigned to it. 

  • You install a stock open source agent on your server, which means we have no control over the code you install, 
  • You don't have to open a port in your firewall, 
  • You can disable passive items, and disable remote commands, 
  • By default, the zabbix agent cannot just execute commands on your server, it can only get certain statistics, 
  • You define the userparams that the agent can execute. Userparams are necessary for gathering some specific data, mostly application-specific. (such as Postfix queue and Apache process info)
 

We will be monitoring your machine by using a piece of software called the Zabbix agent. The agent is available for many different platforms, listed below. 

  • Linux/Unix/FreeBSD/Solaris

If you are using any of these Operating Systems, you can usually find a package in a repository  that provides the zabbix agent. The advantage of using your packaging mechanism is that updating, removing and installing becomes much simpler. Please check with your distribution to find the best repositories to use.

Repositories
Distribution Repository Comment
Debian Lenny lenny-backports http://packages.debian.org/lenny-backports/zabbix-agent
RedHat/CentOS Andrew Farley http://andrewfarley.com/sysadmin/rpm-repository-online / http://repo.andrewfarley.com
Other   Check your distro-provider

 

  • Windows

Pre-compiled agents for windows can be found on the zabbix website. If you are using any of these Operating Systems, you can usually find a package in a repository that provides the Zabbix agent. The advantage of using your packaging mechanism is that updating, removing and installing becomes much simpler. Please check with your distribution to find the best repositories to use. 

We monitor each of the different parameters we keep track of in a different interval. That means for instance that we monitor ethernet traffic every 5 seconds, cpu usage every 10 seconds, but the total amount of memory in your server is only updated once every 24 hours currently. In short, we set the intervals to something that makes practical sense.

We also have two different variables that determine how long we keep the monitored data in our database. We currently keep the history for the past 60 days. That means that we keep every single collected value for 60 days. After that, the data gets summarised and we keep only the trends. We keep those for 365 days.

The amount of system resources our monitoring agent uses on your system depends on the amount of server monitoring the agent has to do. If you have many roles assigned to your server, it will be a bit more busy then with fewer roles.

Here is an example of the running zabbix processes on one of our web servers:

[09-03-11 13:50:09] [root@xyz.com]
[~] # ps aux | grep zabbix
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
zabbix    6394  0.0  0.0  49168   844 ?        SN   09:46   0:00 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd
zabbix    6395  0.0  0.0  49168  1468 ?        SN   09:46   0:09 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd
zabbix    6396  0.0  0.0  51264  1468 ?        SN   09:46   0:08 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd
root     20472  0.0  0.0   5164   780 pts/1    R+   13:50   0:00 grep zabbix

Our SMS costs are included in your monthly server monitoring price. That means you don't pay a single cent extra for text messages we send to your mobile in case of alerts arising from potential issues on your servers.

For an overview of networks that are covered, please refer to this page on our SMS provider's site