Summary

This was the chapter where we finally got some real action: monitoring an item, creating a trigger, and getting a notification on this trigger. We also explored the Zabbix frontend a bit and looked at the basic item parameters. Let's review what basic steps were required to get our first alert:

• We started by creating a host. In Zabbix, everything to be monitored is attached to a logical entity called a host.
• Next, we created an item. Being the basis of information gathering, items define parameters about monitored metrics, including what data to gather, how often to gather it, how to store the retrieved values, and other things.
• After the item, we created a trigger. Each trigger contains an expression that is used to define thresholds. For each trigger, a severity can be configured as well. To let Zabbix know how to reach us, we configured our e-mail settings. This included specifying an e-mail server for the media type and adding media to our user profile.
• As the final configuration step, we created an action. Actions are configuration entities that define actual operations to perform and can have conditions to create flexible rules for what to do about various events.
• Well, we actually did one more thing to make sure it all works—we created a problem. It is useful to test your configuration, especially when just starting with Zabbix. Our configuration was correct, so we were promptly notified about the problem.

While this knowledge is already enough to configure a very basic monitoring system, we'll have to explore other areas before it can be considered a functional one. In the next chapter, we will figure out what the difference between passive and active items is and what the important things to keep in mind are when setting up each of them. We'll also cover basic ICMP items and other item properties such as positional parameters, value mapping, units, and custom intervals.