Currently working as a Senior Technical Infrastructure admin at a large hospital, 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.
I recenty rediscovered Ansible and wondered if I could use Ansible to create trigger actions and scripts to maintain my home lab. It turns out you can with some adjustments to the Zabbix server.
As an example I use Zabbix to monitor the available updates on my Debian vm’s. When updates are detected, I fire up my dedicated Ansible vm and run my update playbook, which works fine. The only downside is that I must boot the dedicated Ansible server and run the playbooks against the “to be updated” hosts. This is a bit time consumming and wondered if I could update the vm using Zabbix.
What if I could run the playbooks directly from within the Zabbix instance? Mmmm!
I went on the net looking for examples of such howto’s, but wasn’t able to find any. Guess I had to make my own then.
As there were a few nice “how to’s” found on the internet about setting up Zabbix running on Docker containers within the Synology nas, time will eventually catch up those articles, as it will catch up this article eventually.
This article is just FYI and is based on a mixture of “the monitoring artist” and “Struiners Unie“. I don’t get into the details as my fellow Zabbix enthusiasts did but present you a working system.
First to know is that we are using three separate containers. One for the DB storage, one for the actual DB and one for Zabbix.
Step 1:
Create a new directory within the shared Docker directory (which is created when installing Docker). I called it Zabbix:)
Docker Share
Step 2:
Create a Docker container with the following command:
docker run -d -v /var/lib/mysql --name zabbix-db-storage busybox:latest
This will create a container which hasn’t a lot of use, but is needed so we can link to actual storage. Create a volume within this container and point it to the newly create directory:
linked storage
As far as I can see, we just need to start up the container for one time, afterwards we can ignore the container.
Wait a few (+/- 10 minutes) minutes and the zabbix will be available to you, using Admin as user and zabbix as password.
Enjoy
PS.
I have noticed that browsing my Zabbix webpage, there was a google tracker active which can be disabled within the container environment parameter : XXL_analytics = false. It’s on by default. Just that you know.
A year ago I decided that my current Synology DS1815+ was ready to take on some extra ram. Factory delivered, the nas only has 2GB of ram, which is not much. Especially when you want to use the SSD cache feature, the minimal ram needed was 6GB. So I upgraded it;)
Now that I have discovered Docker, which can be memory intensive at times (using Zabbix containers) it was time to further upgrade the ram. And although Synology stated that only the maximum of 6GB ram is supported I wandered around the internetz and found out it is possible to upgrade the ram to 16GB. Continue reading Synology DS1815+ 16GB ram upgrade→
I love really appreciate Zabbix. Since I am working with Zabbix for quite some time now, I’m eager to test new releases, which I do. The most simple way is to grab the appliance from the main repo and swing it into WMware workstation (or Virtualbox for that matter).
As I know the boys and girls at Zabbis SIA are really doing there best, I have noticed some bugs configuration errors which really are annoying. Within this post I will summarize what I have found within the nice Zabbix appliances and hopefully will help you on your own Zabbix way. Continue reading Zabbix Appliance Glitches→
