Zabbix Summit 2018

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On October 5th and 6th 2018, we had the pleasure of taking part in the “Zabbix Summit 2018” organised for the eighth time.
The meeting was held (as previously) in the beautiful and historic city of Riga, the hometown of the organiser of the meeting – Zabbix SIA.
The “Zabbix Summit” conference brings together a huge number of IT specialists who usually deal with maintaining systems and thus need a flexible, efficient and adaptable monitoring system. Zabbix is such a system.

The main theme (and, at the same time, the most awaited one) was the issue of Zabbix 4.0 with long-term support (LTS). This version, probably not coincidentally, appeared a few days before the beginning of the conference and in our opinion, it satisfied the appetites for new products, at least for the majority of participants (including us).

The inaugural speech of Alexei Vladishev, CEO of Zabbix SIA, was devoted mainly to the subject of new functionalities, i.e.:
• a new mechanism for creating dashboards, refreshed charts (similar to those generated by Grafana), a display mode without unnecessary functionality (Kiosk mode),
• possibility to download the value of the indicator “on demand” – a small change, I think everyone was pleased with (was met with applause from the participants).
• a new type of data sources (HTTP Item),
• the possibility of changing the criticality level of the problem during its occurrence,
and many other modifications (full list via this link below)

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/4.0/manual/introduction/whatsnew400.

During an interesting presentation from Kaspars Mednis of the Zabbix team, titled “Zabbix Trips & Tricks” we were able to improve our system administration skills and learn more about the new features in the web interface itself (“Visualize it! Zabbix UI” – Aleksey Petrov).

One of the most interesting lectures was on the optimisation of the Zabbix system in terms of high performance, led by the Russians, Mikhail Makurov and Maxim Chernetsova, from Intersvyaz, a provider of internet services. They presented their path to achieve a staggering 50,000 new values collected by the system in a second. Such a solution requires an atypical approach and the use of some quite different from standard (relational) database of storage locations of collected values. In this case, ‘ClickHouse’ turned out to be the most efficient (https://clickhouse.yandex/).

Another interesting item in the conference “menu”, was a lecture dedicated to service activities (updates, migrations) of the Zabbix system (operating in a highly available environment – HA) performed in such a way as to obtain zero time in monitoring and alerting system downtime. A “recipe” has been given, which means a set goal can be achieved by properly designing the monitoring environment.

The “Zabbix Summit” is not just a set of presentations. This is a great opportunity to meet people from the industry from around the world, exchange experiences and make valuable contacts. As we know, monitoring covers various layers of systems: from the hardware layer to the user’s activity in the application, which is why the cross-section of specialists participating in the conference was very diverse.

The organiser provided plenty of opportunities for joint meetings and discussions, filling our time quite nicely until late in the evening. In every respect, the organisation of the event was perfect!

At the end, we are proud to have obtained the Zabbix 4.0 Certified Specialist certificate, which was the result of a great exam result. We hope that it will allow us to take even better care of our clients’ systems and respond faster to any issues.

This post is also available in: Polski (Polish)