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+Zabbix performance tip
+######################
+
+:date: 2011-05-13T19:03:31Z
+:category: blog
+:tags: zabbix,monitoring
+:url: blog/2011/5/13/zabbix-performance-tip.html
+:save_as: blog/2011/5/13/zabbix-performance-tip.html
+:status: published
+:author: Gergely Polonkai
+
+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.