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+---
+layout:    post
+title:     "Zabbix performance tip"
+date:      2011-05-13 19:03:31+00:00
+tags:      [zabbix, monitoring]
+permalink: /blog/2011/5/13/zabbix-performance-tip
+published: true
+author:
+    name: Gergely Polonkai
+    email: gergely@polonkai.eu
+---
+
+Recently I have switched from [MRTG](http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/) + [Cacti](http://www.cacti.net/) + [Nagios](http://www.nagios.org/) + [Gnokii](http://www.gnokii.org/) to [Zabbix](http://www.zabbix.com/), and I
+must say I’m more than satisfied with it. It can do anything the former tools
+did, and much more. First of all, it can do the same monitoring as Nagios did,
+but it does much more fine. It can check several parameters within one
+request, so network traffic is kept down. Also, its web front-end can generate
+any kinds of graphs from the collected data, which took Cacti away. Also, it
+can do SNMP queries (v1-v3), so querying my switches’ port states and traffic
+made easy, taking MRTG out of the picture (I know Cacti can do it either, it
+had historical reasons we had both tools installed). And the best part: it can
+send SMS messages via a GSM modem natively, while Nagios had to use Gnokii.
+The trade-off is, I had to install Zabbix agent on all my monitored machines,
+but I think it worths the price. I even have had to install NRPE to monitor
+some parameters, which can be a pain on Windows hosts, while Zabbix natively
+supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X.
+
+So I only had to create a MySQL database (which I already had for NOD32
+central management), and install Zabbix server. Everything went fine, until I
+reached about 1300 monitored parameters. MySQL seemed to be a bit slow on disk
+writes, so my Zabbix “queue” filled up in no time. After reading some forums,
+I decided to switch to PostgreSQL instead. Now it works like charm, even with
+the default Debian settings. However, I will have to add several more
+parameters, and my boss wants as many graphs as you can imagine, so I’m more
+than sure that I will have to fine tune my database later.