What is this book about ?¶

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in this Zabbix guide.

In the past, I authored the Zabbix Cookbook and co-authored Zabbix 4 Network Monitoring with Richards, both published by Packt.

Zabbix Cookbook Zabbix 4 Network Monitoring

The Zabbix Cookbook was one of the first comprehensive resources for Zabbix users, though it's now somewhat outdated. It has since been succeeded by the Zabbix 7 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook, written by Brian and Nathan—two individuals I highly recommend and enjoy collaborating with.

Packt offers a wide range of other Zabbix-related books. You can browse the full collection here. Additionally, for those looking for non-English titles, Amazon provides Zabbix books in languages such as Chinese, Spanish, and more, published by Packt and other publishers. Find them here.

As Zabbix is an open-source product, my goal was never to make money from the books I wrote. This led me to reflect on how I could approach things differently. I wanted to create a book that would be freely available and updated with each new version of Zabbix.

Being a strong advocate of documentation in Markdown or AsciiDoc, I decided to share the book in a Git repository, using Markdown as the format. The only challenge left was how to present those Markdown files in a reader-friendly way, like a traditional book. After some research, I discovered MkDocs, a Python-based library that converts Markdown files into HTML and can be templated. With MkDocs, the problem was solved, and a new book was born.

Who Am I?¶

My name is Patrik Uytterhoeven, and I work for a Belgian company called Open-Future. I joined Open-Future in January 2013, and that's when my journey with Zabbix began. The company provided me with the opportunity to grow my expertise and become a certified Zabbix trainer. As of this year, I’ve been a Zabbix trainer for 10 years.

If you're interested in attending one of my trainings, you can register at www.open-future.be. You might wonder, "Why take a training if I can read this book for free?" While books provide extensive information on setup and configuration, trainings offer valuable insights, tips, and feedback that you won’t find easy in a book. Books simply can't cover every detail.

What Operating System Do I Need?¶

As someone who primarily works with RHEL-based systems, I believe RHEL is the optimal choice for production environments. For this reason, I’ve chosen to focus on one of its free forks. Zabbix is supported on Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Raspberry Pi, and other systems, and it can be compiled on any Unix-based OS. However, it's nearly impossible to cover every OS in this book. Since the book is open-source and hosted on Git, feel free to contribute code for your preferred distribution! In this book, I will use Rocky Linux 9, but the instructions should apply to most other installations as well.

What Version of Zabbix Is Used in This Book?¶

This book focuses on Zabbix 7.0, as it is the latest LTS (Long Term Support) release. Most of the content will be relevant to other versions, though minor changes may exist. In the future, if the community supports updating this book, it would be fantastic to create a version for every LTS release.

How to Use This Book¶

This book is designed to cover a wide range of topics. If you feel something is missing, please reach out or make a pull request.

You don’t need to start at page one and read through to the end. Some readers may seek basic knowledge, while others might want to skip directly to more advanced topics. I aim to make this book useful for everyone by providing detailed explanations and clear steps for each topic.

Throughout the book, you'll encounter code snippets. These will be presented in code blocks like the one below:

# sudo yum install zabbix-server-mysql

Notes to some useful documentation will be added at the bottom of the page.

Here is a simple footnote¹. With some additional text after it.

In case there is some important information to share I will add notes in the documentation like can be seen here :

Note