Zabbix graphs improvements patch

Update: You'd better check out zabbixGrapher

Here is the cumulative patch to fix some Zabbix graphs viewing issues. Ideas are not new, a lot of zabbix users complains on current out-of-the-box implementation:

• ZBXNEXT-1120 - Enable viewing a graph for all hosts in a given group
• ZBXNEXT-75 - Add a "show all" option for viewing all graphs for a host on one page
• ZBXNEXT-1262 - Nested host groups
• Minor graph appearance fix

Full patch is for Zabbix 2.4.3. You can open it on github and read below what each change do:

 

include/views/monitoring.charts.php (Javascript in the beginning)

This adds groups filter. Issue is when you have a lot of groups you'd become tired to scroll them. (We have hosts automatically registering to Zabbix and attached to group). For example in this case groups "EXRMF BC", "EXRMF CO", "EXRMF DC3" etc. are merged to one group "EXRMF >". When you select such group another select appears on the right side allowing to specify exact group.


This only happens when user allowed to view more than 50 groups, tweak this line if you need to change it:

if(jQuery('#groupid option').length>50){

include/views/monitoring.charts.php (the rest PHP code)

This implements both ZBXNEXT-1120 and ZBXNEXT-75. So, now you can select host and do not specify graph to view all its graphs on one page. Or select graph to view and do not specify host (or even a group) to view this graph for multiple hosts.

As it is possible to have a lot of graphs attached to one server, or a lot of servers having the same graph (eth0 traffic) - paging is used here. Tweak this line to determine how many graphs should be displayed per page:

CWebUser::$data['rows_per_page'] = 20;

js/class.csuggest.js

This change is for search field. You start typing servers and got list of suggestions. Pressing Enter previously just selects server from list filling in search field. You have to press Search button to do action. Now action is done automatically.

include/defines.inc.php

This changing font to much smaller one "Calibri". You can take .ttf from Windows and place to /usr/share/zabbix/fonts/

The rest of files

Minor changes for single graph appearance to make it more clean and simplier when multiple graphs are displayed on one page. Example of single graph after change:

Also, you might want to set theme graph background to white. Unfortunately, I do not know how to do it from Web Interface, so here are DB queries:

update graph_theme set backgroundcolor='FFFFFF' where graphthemeid='1';
update graph_theme set graphbordercolor='FFFFFF' where graphthemeid='1';

This patch is not depends but meant to be applied after ZBXNEXT-599 "Logarithmic scale for Y-axis in graphs" like this:

wget https://support.zabbix.com/secure/attachment/35716/logarithmic-graphs-zabbix-2.4.5.patch
wget https://github.com/sepich/zabbix/raw/master/patches/graphs.patch
cd /usr/share/zabbix/
patch -p 1 -i ~/logarithmic-graphs-zabbix-2.4.5.patch
patch -p 1 -i ~/graphs.patch

SynNotes - notes and code snippet manager

If you know what for those programs are

• OneNote
• ResophNotes
• SynTree
• CherryTree
• Evernote
• Google Notebook(dead)
• Zoho Notes

then maybe you would be interested in this post. I've tried all of those apps, and used some of them for couple years. Mostly it is for code snippets, but sometime for note taking too. That's why I wanted code syntax highlighting and ability to quickly hide and show app by hotkey. Unfortunately I was not able to find app solving both items.
That's how SynTree was born back in 2006. As time goes by, new idea of syncing everything to cloud come and simplenote.com API released for developers. I'd like the idea and thought to add it's support to SynTree, but it was written in Delphi 6 and stored all data in memory. As my notes counted megabytes already, I was too lazy to search for old Delphi IDE as already have free Visual Studio installed, so decided to rewrite everything from scratch in C# and use sqlite to not limit notes size.
Meet SynNotes - simple syntax highlighted Notes manager with incremental full-text search and GMaill like tags as folders. Most of the time app basically hides in the system tray. Then you push global hotkey, and it appears with last Note opened and Search field already focused. After you found data needed hide the app back by pressing ESC.





When you have some notes created - you probably would like to sync them to other your workstations/mobile devices. Also, versioning and cloud backups would be nice. All that provided if you enable sync with your Simplenote account

ElasticSearch internals monitoring by Zabbix (v2 traps)

Here is more resource oriented version of ElasticSearch monitoring from previous article with using zabbix-traps. Also, it comes with very basic template, which was so asked in comments:



Graphs included:

• Shard's nodes status
• Indices tasks speed
• Indices tasks time spend

MySQL internals monitoring by Zabbix

There are a lot of examples how to monitor MySQL internal by zabbix-agent, like:

• http://wiki.enchtex.info/howto/zabbix/advanced_mysql_monitoring
• https://www.zabbix.com/wiki/doku.php?id=howto/monitor/db/mysql/extensive_mysql_monitoring_including_replication
• https://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20488

but you know - the main issue is NIH ;) Those solutions are too heavy and use dependencies like php. Also, mysql "SHOW GLOBAL STATUS" provides with hundreds of values, and its hard to select ~50 of most valuable. Last link is best solution found, I've updated it a little:

• Fast and light - only one bash file
• Zabbix traps are used to send data in one chunk, lowering system load and bandwidth
• 45 items, 13 triggers, 11 graphs

RabbitMQ internals monitoring by Zabbix

Continuation of extending zabbix-agent to monitor internals of applications. Now it's a RabbitMQ turn:


What's supported:

• File descriptors, Memory, Sockets watermarks monitoring
• Low level discovery of vhosts/queues
• Monitoring for messages, unack, consumers per queue
• Triggers for important counters
• Data sent in chunks, not one by one, using zabbix traps

Network socket state statistics monitoring by Zabbix

It's strange that zabbix-agent lacks for information about network socket states. At least it would be nice to monitor number of ESTAB, TIME_WAIT and CLOSE_WAIT connections.
Good that we can extend zabbix-agent - so I made this:

userscript: AWS Docs Column Reader

Continuation of Wikipedia goes 3 columns
but now for AWS documentation:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com

This script will make long lines split to 3 columns, to make text more readable for wide screens.
It will turn this:



to this:


Installation:
- You need a userscript compatible browser
- Then just click this link

putty-nd vs SuperPuTTY

I've been using putty-nd for a long time. Starting from putty_nd2.0 it started to support chrome-like tabs and development was going quite rapidly. Lu Dong (author) was always responding to emails and bugs were fixed fast. But unfortunately this stopped at Feb 2014 with few annoying bugs left:

• When some tab connection drops, it can randomly freeze some other tab, so you need to reconnect both of them
• Tab names are right aligned. So, when you have a lot of tabs opened, their width is short and you see only endings of names like '...ain.local' instead of 'server1.doma..'
• When you click 'open new session' button and starting to type search query - it always skips first letter
• And the most unfortunate was that putty-nd sources weren't available. Latest one I was able to find was v6.0_nd1.11 back from 2011.

Nevertheless of those issues I still was using putty-nd. Because other clients like MobaXterm, Xshell, MTPuTTY, mRemoteNG were even more inconvenient. Here is what I liked in putty-nd so much:

1. When there are >1000 sessions configured - you will never click by mouse in tree-like menu to open a new session. Preferably to have quick live search bind to hotkey
2. Having only hostname in clipboard and no such session configured, open new one based on some predefined settings in couple of keypress
3. When session was dropped, restart it without touching mouse (like pressing Enter in it)

SuperPuTTY has almost 2 bullets from 3 above. And most importantly it is opensource. So, next time I got mad from putty-nd frozen tabs I'd decided to move to SuperPuTTY. A little patching and it became a usable client for me ;)

Here is what was done:

1. Open Session dialog

Now search field always stay focused, pressing Up/Down you changing selection in table. Second column shows only folder name of session in tree. To search for all sessions in some folder start searching with '/' (as in example). Searching for hostname was changed to be matched from beginning, to search for any part of hostname - prepend search with '%'.
For example to find connection 'i.sepa.spb.ru' from screenshot, one could search for '%sepa'

2. Added detection of dropped connection. For such tabs icon will be changed (to icon from putty-nd ;)

For those first two tabs context menu will be also reduced. When you switch to such tab and press Enter in console, session will try to reconnect.

For other changes see commit history: github.com/sepich/superputty/commits/master
Download precompiled binaries here: github.com/sepich/superputty/releases

Main patches were submitted back to SuperPuTTY community - hope some of them would be merged upstream.

ElasticSearch internals monitoring by Zabbix

NOTE: New version of this article with use of zabbix_traps is here

There is quite a lot of Zabbix monitoring agent extensions for ElasticSearch monitoring. But they are limited and provide just some predefined counters. What if you need to collect internal data?

Debian Wheezy and Brocade 1010/1020/1007 10Gbps CNA

There are two ways to make Brocade 1010/1020/1007 10Gbps CNA working in Debian Wheezy:
1. Right way: Go to official Brocade site, download 3Gb(!) iso image with binaries for kernel-2.6 (!) and sources. Compile sources for Debian's kernel-3.2.
2. Quick way: It's not right but just works, if you need quickly enable networking with new kernel.