Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) is an event in Nuremberg, Germany. It started back in 2006 as a Nagios Conference, and got renamed to OSMC in 2009. As the name implies, it started out very focused on Nagios, then slowly became more generic with various other monitoring-related topics being included. I had the pleasure of attending the conference this year and here’s a small summary of a few of the very interesting talks at OSMC 2016.
Visiting the Open Source Monitoring Conference 2016, Part 1
Zabbix has an issue tracker for reporting bugs and feature requests. Users tend not to notice a voting feature in the upper right corner. But even when users find out about this feature, they might get a question – is it worth voting on issues?
As someone working in IT infrastructure, every now and then you are confronted with a problem that you are not certain how to solve. Often times I have found myself overthinking things and ending up with a complex solution that isn’t very elegant but get’s the job done.
You have recently started with Zabbix, and stumbled upon something that doesn’t look right. What do do? You might want to report it as a bug. Let’s talk about the suggested way to do that.
In the post about the first day of the conference I explicitly mentioned that the coffee/tea breaks were fairly long. And that was not a complaint – it was a positive observation and “thank you” to the organisers. Why should conferences have long breaks then?
We covered the main talks during day one and day two of the Zabbix Conference 2016, but there were a few more things that happened in the conference hall at the end of the second day. After the main talks were over, in 5-minute long lightning talks various topics were introduced and briefly covered.
Afterwards, the participants had a chance to ask questions to the Zabbix team. While there is a lot of talking going on off-the-record (conference participants catching a developer, separate sessions for Zabbix partners etc), this was a chance both to raise a topic to be heard by a bigger audience, and find out something if you had not managed to grab a Zabbix team member before.
A relatively common Zabbix feature request is to change the interval of a Zabbix item (how often the item is updated) based on the value of the item. This post will illustrate how to use a trigger to execute a Perl script to meet this goal.
In this example, the item will be a net.tcp.service[]item to check a web server for an http response. The goal is to have this service checked every 5 minutes (300 seconds) under normal conditions, but if the response indicates that the service is down, change the interval to 60 seconds, which will allow the trigger to get cleared faster. Additionally, once the service is back up, the interval should return to 5 minutes. Continue reading Using the Zabbix::Tiny to change an item interval based on a trigger.→
The second day of the Zabbix conference started with workshops. This was a completely new thing, thus there was limited experience with organising these. There were four workshops in two tracks:
It’s been a few weeks since the Zabbix Conference 2016. If you are considering attending next year, you might want to know – how was it? In one word, great. But that doesn’t tell much, so let’s briefly explore how it went.
The conference started with a talk by Alexei Vladishev, the original author of Zabbix. He shared the improvements in the soon-to-be-released Zabbix 3.2 and the usually-interesting statistics on the conference itself. This year the 3rd biggest number of participants was from the Netherlands, second from France and Russia had the first place. Importantly, he assured all the participants that Zabbix will always be true open source software – also commonly known as Free software.