Zabbix VS Ansible

Zabbix

Zabbix is a comprehensive open-source monitoring solution designed for real-time monitoring and management of various network components, such as servers, networks, and applications. It excels in data collection and processing, enabling proactive monitoring for early issue detection and resolution.

The PHP core package is offered as pre-compiled binary via Ports packages system. In addition, important softwares such as extensions, Composer and PECL libraries are available. So are frameworks such as NextCloud and Zabbix.

Prometheus is a great way to go, however you need to invest time in writing all the alerts. This was a daunting task for us, because we have too many vendors and device types.. we instead went with zabbix, which is a free open source platform similar to Orion. Quite easy to setup. All the device templates for monitoring alerting are provided by the community. There is a grafana plugin which integrates with Zabbix, so you can build beautiful dashboards in grafana while using the polling and alerting logic in zabbix. You can also use grafana OnCall via a zabbix integration. Phase1: You could move to zabbix. Realize cost savings without investing time. Phase2: learn and work on moving things to Prometheus slowly. edit: added links and some rewording

Setup Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com/) and use SNMP (search for a template for your switches, chances are someone has created one) to pull throughput data from the switchport your proxies are connected to. This will graph them for you on a continual basis, you can then setup some triggers (alerts) that will flag over-utilization (say >80Mbps) for you, can generate an email or SMS alert based on that or just see it in the dashboard.

Look at setting up Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com/) you can then do ping and latency tests to key hosts/endpoints and get packet loss and other variables in a graphical format. Also will allow you to setup monitoring to alert when there are known issues.

Check out Zabbix. Similar to something like PRTG (I see was already mentioned) but it is a free solution. Only cost is setup time and infrastructure.

now if its more metric data you are using and want to do APM, prometheus is your man https://prometheus.io/, want to make prometheus your full time job? deploy cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/, honorable mention in the metrics space, Zabbix, https://www.zabbix.com/ I've seen use cases of zabbix going way beyond its intended use its a fantastic tool

- NMS / NPM: NetXMS, Zabbix, LibreNMS, PRTG - NCM, updates, automation: Unimus - IaC / automation: Ansible - DCIM / IPAM: NetBox - IPAM / DDI: Infoblox

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.