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)

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 🙂