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Zabbix 5 IT
Infrastructure
Monitoring
Cookbook
Explore the new features of Zabbix 5 for designing,
building, and maintaining your Zabbix setup

Nathan Liefting

Brian van Baekel

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

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Zabbix 5 IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Cookbook

Copyright © 2021 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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Publishing Product Manager: Rahul Nair
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First published: January 2021

Production reference: 1290121

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place
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B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-80020-223-8

www.packt.com

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To my grandparents, for supporting my education, my brother, for always

being at the ready, and my mom and stepdad, for cheering me on. To my
girlfriend, for always supporting whatever new idea I get into my head. To
my colleagues throughout the years, my first mentor, Sander F., for inspiring
me, and Brian, for making it all possible.

– Nathan Liefting

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Foreword
2020 was probably for most of us not the most typical year. There was the Covid-19 issue
that stopped the world as we know it. To make things worse, I had to deal with some
personal and family issues last year, so writing a new book was not top of the list of
things I wanted to do in 2020. So, when Packt asked me to write a successor to the Zabbix
Cookbook, I had to decline.
Of course, I didn't want to let the book be written by someone I didn't believe in, and
Packt asked me if I knew someone who was willing and able to write the book.
My first thoughts went to Brian, who I have worked closely with over the years and who I
think I can call a friend. I focus on the Belgian market, while Brian focuses on the Dutch
and the US markets, but we both speak the same language. Being certified Zabbix trainers,
speaking the same language helps a lot when we run into unknown issues when we give
training or do some work for a client.
Brian became a certified trainer a few years after me but has grown quickly in a short time
and is very dedicated to the job. A few years ago, Brian was even bold enough to start his
own business, with the main focus on Zabbix. Last year, when most businesses had to
downsize or went broke, Brian managed to even hire someone to expand his company.
This is where Nathan came into the picture. Nathan already had some experience with
Zabbix, of course, but he managed to help with the book and also became a certified
Zabbix trainer in probably one of the most economically difficult years in recent history.
So, I think I can say that I am certain this book has been worked on by the best people for
the job. I know that Brian and Nathan have spent lots of time on this book in the last year,
and I know they are dedicated and knowledgeable. I hope you like what they did with this
book, and I hope it will help you with your first steps in setting up and running Zabbix.
Good luck, and thank you Brian and Nathan.
Patrik Uytterhoeven
Open Source Consultant / Zabbix trainer at Open-Future, Nossegem Belgium

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Contributors
About the authors
Nathan Liefting, also known as Larcorba, is an IT consultant, trainer, and content
creator (artist). He has more than 6 years of professional experience in IT. His experience
ranges from managing networks running EVPN/VXLAN to Linux environments and
programming. Nathan started working with Zabbix in 2016, when it was still at Zabbix 2
and Zabbix 3 was just released.
He now works for Opensource ICT Solutions BV in the Netherlands as a Zabbix trainer
and consultant, designing and building professional Zabbix environments and Zabbix
components for some of the biggest companies around the world.
Brian van Baekel quickly discovered how powerful Zabbix is during his career as
a network engineer. Ever since, he has been working with Zabbix in various (large)
environments, leading to his official Zabbix Certified Trainer certification in early 2017.
In 2018, Brian founded Opensource ICT Solutions BV in the Netherlands and
Opensource ICT Solutions LLC in the USA. Both companies primarily focus on building
Zabbix environments all over the world. Fun fact: even his cat is named "Zabbix."

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About the reviewers

James Cook is a seasoned IT engineer from Perth, Western Australia, specializing in
systems administration, monitoring, automation, and programming. He currently
works for a large-scale managed service provider (Kinetic IT Pty. Ltd.) leading a team of
colleagues who specialize in developing monitoring and automation solutions for both
on-premise and cloud technologies. His latest work has focused on developing a Zabbix
monitoring solution for his employer's clients that is scalable, catering for multiple
tenants, along with developing integration that provides automated service restoration
and incident management. James is an experienced programmer, competent in several
languages, including C, Python, Ruby, and Perl. He uses these to automate and integrate
different products while making the pain of manual tasks disappear.
Justin Addams was born and raised in Western Australia. He is a highly skilled IT
professional with over 10 years of industry experience. Most of the time you can find him
monitoring systems or automating some inane task out of existence to save someone's
sanity. He holds both the Zabbix Certified Specialist and Professional certifications. This,
in combination with working a wide array of positions, from small business IT services to
infrastructure support to enterprise management systems development, has led to a solid
skillset in supporting business requirements through monitoring and automation.

I would like to thank the light of my life, my wife.

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Table of Contents
Preface

1
Getting Started with Zabbix and User Management
Technical requirements 2 Getting ready 20
Installing the Zabbix server 2 How to do it… 20

Getting ready 3 Creating user groups 26

How to do it… 3
Getting ready 26
How it works… 6
How to do it… 28
Setting up the Zabbix frontend 6 Creating your first users 31
Getting ready 7
Getting ready 31
How to do it… 7
How to do it… 32
How it works… 12
Advanced user authentication
Using the Zabbix frontend 12 with SAML 37
Getting ready 13 Getting ready 37
How to do it… 14 How to do it… 39
Navigating the frontend 19 How it works… 41
There's more… 42

2
Setting Up Zabbix Monitoring
Technical requirements 44 How it works… 50
Setting up Zabbix agent 2 See also 51
monitoring44 Working with SNMP monitoring 51
Getting ready 44
Getting ready 51
How to do it 44

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