Monitor Your Net with Free, High-Performance ZABBIX

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Triggers
All of this monitoring is well and good, but what really makes it worthwhile is setting the alert trigger levels to a level that is useful to you. This is completely customizable, so you can play interesting tricks like "make the triggers more sensitive before you leave on vacation and leave everything in the capable hands of your new assistant." (It's not hazing, it's accelerated training.)

For example, you want to watch the incoming traffic load on a particular NIC:

({bratgrrl.com:netloadin1[eth1]})>500K

When number of received bytes on eth1 is more than 500 KB within a minute, an alert will be triggered. A very useful trigger is changes in files that should not change, like files in /bin:

({bratgrrl.com:cksum[/bin/login].diff(0)})>0

It takes a bit of practice to get the hang of writing triggers, but the ZABBIX manual documents all the options thoroughly and gives a lot of useful examples.

Pretty Graphs
A picture is truly worth a thousand words, and ZABBIX comes with bales of customizable graphs. Graphs are customizable to show whatever you like -- system load, network load, storage, memory, CPU load -- anything that ZABBIX watches can be graphed.

Maps
This is where ZABBIX really earns its beans, with network maps showing all monitored devices and their status, so you know at a glance if there are any trouble spots. The default map does the job quite nicely, and of course you may customize it to your heart's content. Visit the screenshots page to see all of this in action.

The user's manual is good, and the user's forum will help if you get stuck. All in all this is an impressive product. Visit zabbix.com to find downloads, documentation, screenshots, and help resources.

Resources

• the ZABBIX Users' Forum is active and very helpful.
  
• Keeping Accurate Time on Linux
  
• Chapter 9 of the Linux Cookbook
• Chapter 4 "Installing Programs From Source Code"