Building a Better Dashboard for Zabbix

Zabbix Alternative Dashboard
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 🙂

About incama 24 Articles
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 Comments

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

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

    • @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 🙂

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

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

  4. 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

    • 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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