Building a Better Dashboard for Zabbix

Zabbix Alternative Dashboard

Zabbix is great! Since I’ve worked with a lot of Monitoring systems (including HPOM, NNMi, Nagios, Zenoss and Cacti to name a few) Zabbix struck me with it’s Enterprise ready features. It totally fulfills all the needs my employer (and me) wants from a Monitoring system.
All needs??? Mmmm, almost all!

There is one feature I really miss in Zabbix and that’s a decent dashboard function. Yeah, the default dashboard (or screens / slideshows) are great but only for technicians. What I was looking for was a Dashboard that does explain things in a overview without being too technical.

Was I lost? Not really! In comes the Zabbix api!!

We have managed to create a dashboard function using the Zabbix api and php which creates a nice overview of things that are happening in our environment. Although I am not a programmer (I am more a front end developer) we’ve managed (thanks Don!) to create something nice (in my opinion)

Zabbix Alternative Dashboard
Zabbix Alternative Dashboard

What does it do I hear you asking?
Well, it does this and that, but let me summarize it:

  • It’s build with php.
  • It queries a Host Group (via a read only user access) and checks it’s active triggers
  •  If none of it’s trigger are fired, the host is probably ‘ok’ and will be shown in bright green on the dashboard
  • If a trigger gets fired, the color and/or size are adjusted
  • Using jquery and masonry javascripts hosts are aligned on the dashboard.
  • And much more,…

Soon I will publish a second post which will be more “in detail”. Second, I’m going to post the files onto Github so everyone can use/adjust/fork the files.

Happy Zabbixing 🙂

incama

Currently working as a Senior Technical Infrastructure admin at a large hospital, former owner of a single person web design company, in love with my wife, trying to cook out of my league, Bitcoin enthusiast, Open Source Don Quichot, human Cat slave.

14 thoughts on “Building a Better Dashboard for Zabbix

  1. hi, like your post and your dashboard, you already have the path of github? I want to implement in my work environment.

    I’m grateful.

    Luiz

  2. Hi,
    your Dashboard looks very cool. I will test it.
    When do you are ready for an download link?
    I am hungry for this.

  3. This dashboard looks awesome! Can’t wait to “use/adjust/fork the files” 🙂

  4. Sorry for the delay. The download will be available in the first week of January on Github.

  5. So from your initial image, I see you’re monitoring a Windows 2K3 group. Will this rotate through all enabled host groups?

    1. @Marc
      I first want to be certain the code works within different setups. Will publish it on the Zabbix forum when I’m confident enough 🙂
      Thanks for the headsup 🙂

  6. WOW!!! This is exactly what i was looking for!!!

    Just don’t know how to get it to work .

  7. You rock…this was a lifesaver. I decided to try and build my own dashboard, but stumbled upon yours in the process. With a few minor tweaks, I came up with a system that works great for us! We pass the groupid in the URL, and attach an image as well…

    http://imgur.com/a/lXIPX

    1. Thanks Dean! I hope the dashboard will fill your needs. Soon I will do some style reworks of the GUI, just to make it more future ready.

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