Zabbix is now available on Dotdeb

Let me introduce you Zabbix, a very nice all-in-one open source availability and performance monitoring solution that I use everyday on TextMe to ensure that all the applications and servers are going well. Below is a short list of features available in Zabbix:

auto-discovery of servers and network devices (great for autoscaled platforms)
low-level discovery (the killer feature of the 2.0 branch, imho)
distributed monitoring with centralized web administration
support for both polling and trapping mechanisms
server software for Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X
native high performance agents (client software for Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, Tru64/OSF1, Windows NT4.0, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista)
agent-less monitoring
secure user authentication
flexible user permissions
web-based interface
flexible e-mail notification of predefined events
high-level (business) view of monitored resources
audit log…

If you already use Nagios/Centreon/Shinken/whatever, you’ll certainly want to give Zabbix a try. So I’m glad to announce that Zabbix 2.0.4 is now available on Dotdeb for Debian 6.0 GNU/Linux “Squeeze” on both amd64 and i386 architectures.

Please note that :

Future Zabbix stable releases will of course be packaged as well as other pieces of software here on Dotdeb (Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Percona toolkit…), with production in mind.
As usual, packaging scripts are derived from Debian’s ones to ensure full compatibility and they’re available on Github.
For more info and support about Zabbix, feel free to visit Zabbix’ website : Documentation, mailing lists, bug trackers, forums and wiki are very helpful.

I really hope you’ll enjoy Zabbix.

Anthony Somerset December 31, 2012

awesome news, will allow me to test and check the server build so i can not worry about all the pains of compiling from source all the time when updates released

can update agents on debian too at last :)

MrOwen December 31, 2012

Looks like some pretty awesome monitoring software! How much memory does this eat up? As in, can I run it on a small 256 or 512mb vps?

Guillaume Plessis January 1, 2013
@MrOwen : if you’re talking about the agent, it has a very small footprint. On the other side, the zabbix server stores all its metrics and trends in a database, so the more memory it has, the best it will be behave.

David December 31, 2012

I’m having a small issue with dependencies on php5-mysql. I’m using your PHP 5.4 testing repo, with php5-mysqlnd installed. zabbix-frontend-php depends on php5-mysql, but php5-mysql is incompatible with php5-mysqlnd. Can you either mark php5-mysqlnd so it fulfills php5-mysql requirements, or change the zabbix-frontend-php dependencies to include php5-mysqlnd? The latter fix is how the Debian team handled this issue with phpMyAdmin.

Another unrelated question, do you have any plans to support Wheezy before it’s released as stable? The only issue is libssl dependencies- I believe Squeeze has 0.9x and Wheezy has 1.x

Guillaume Plessis January 1, 2013
@David : thanks for the suggestion, this will be available in the next Zabbix packages : https://github.com/gplessis/dotdeb-zabbix/commit/50d01189d7bf4426c13299e930025aaa96db52ad
About Wheezy, I’ll do my best to support it before it’s tagged as stable.

x-f January 1, 2013

NICE!!! I use zabbix since ~1.6 and already 2.0 and it is really amazing. Menory useage is small (depends on settings like SQL pgsql vs mysql and monitored services and other values).

Anthony Somerset January 1, 2013

just going through this myself in a test environment to understand what extra steps are needed to install the zabbix-server side - i notice that the frontend-php package depends on apache2 is there anyway of adjusting this so it can also depend on nginx & php5-fpm as an alternative to apache

IE if i install nginx and php5-fpm ahead of time it won’t install apache2 for me (but would by default if no webserver/php detected) - i’m not sure how this is done in debian packaging dependancy mapping

Anthony Somerset January 1, 2013
ignore this, doing some better reading shows that this already happens :)

Ferdian January 1, 2013

Awesome, previously using Nagios, but I would give Zabbix a try for sure.

Anonymous January 1, 2013

Thanks! Looks really awesome, I just installed it and have done some basic configuration, and it works like a charm. I really had bigger problems with setting up nagios with some basic configuration, but this works out-of-the-box and really intuitive. Looks really great, now I am thinking about doing all the monitoring stuff with Zabbix in future. Thank you very much!

iwik January 10, 2013

Great. Are this packages usable to do upgrade from 1.8.2-1squeeze4 or just for clean install?

Guillaume Plessis January 10, 2013
@Iwik : I did never upgrade a Zabbix server from 1.8.2 using my packages. I guess you’ll have to plan a maintenance to upgrade your DB schema using the scripts provided in /usr/share/zabbix-server-YOURDB/

David Goodwin January 14, 2013

Zabbix Server was a resource hog when I last tried it … this was a few years ago though (with a PostgreSQL backend)

moses January 26, 2013

I installed Zabbix (server,agent, frontend) and I was not asked any question during

the installation process (like i saw in other installation tutorials from package)

what else do I need to do after the Zabbix installation? are there more staff to be configured or installed in addition to what i’ve already

done? (I already have LAMP installed). can you please make a short tutorial for the next steps?.

thank you moses

moses February 8, 2013

I found the problem, I should have done the flowing alias: ln -s /usr/share/doc/zabbix-frontend-php/examples/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zabbix

and of course read the zabbix-frontend-php.README.Debian