Zabbix Summit 2018

Welcome to Riga

On Thursday morning (04.10.2018) a group of four aspectra staff members made their way to the airport. The trip went to Latvia's capital, Riga. On the first evening the company Zabbix LLC organized a Halloween party to welcome everyone and break the ice. Besides a soap bubble show we were also entertained by an arm wrestling competition. We had the opportunity to watch Count Dracula defeat another vampire and later get knocked down by another creature. The prelude was not bad at all!

Days of learning

Over the next two days, a busy program followed where everything revolved around Zabbix. We started early in the morning. The CEO and founder of the company, Alexei Vladishev, presented some highlights of the recently released version 4.0 of Zabbix. Over the course of the day, a number of Zabbix employees presented individual components and functions of the software in detail. Users from all over the world had the chance to talk about their own challenges and how they could solve them with Zabbix.

Day 2 started with two one-hour workshops where we could try out new features in a Zabbix installation in accordance with the instructions. During the day, Alexei turned to the audience again to share plans and future developments for Zabbix. The information was received with interest and applause.

The Zabbix Summit was an excellent opportunity to network with Zabbix developers, managers and other Zabbix staff as well as other users from around the world. We were able to learn from the experiences of others and gain a deep insight into the software directly from the developers.

Hang on a second. What is Zabbix and what does it have to do with aspectra?

In order to be able to monitor the ever increasing number of components and achieve the ever shorter delivery time that is being expected, we will eventually need to replace our current monitoring software. A while ago, an evaluation of different possible solutions was performed. aspectra opted for the open source monitoring software Zabbix, which is developed by the company Zabbix LLC in Riga, Latvia. As part of the evaluation, we put a minor Zabbix installation into operation to gain experience and prepare for productive use.

aspectra expects the following motoring and alarming services from Zabbix:

• Automatic monitoring of new systems
• Automatic detection of new components on the systems (databases, hard disks, applications, etc.)
• Granular configuration of the alerting system
• Minimization of false alarms

We are currently fine-tuning and integrating Zabbix into our environments. Once this is complete, we will begin using it in our operations.

More about Zabbix

• Zabbix Summit 2018
• Zabbix - The Enterprise-Class Open Source Network Monitoring Solution
• Video: Best of Zabbix Summit 2018