Zabbix Moscow Meetup 2018 in Badoo: review and materials

Hi, Habr!

My name is Ilya Ableev, I work in the monitoring department of Badoo. On June 23, my colleagues and I held another Zabbix Moscow Meetup.

Representatives of Zabbix, Badoo, QIWI and Grafana Labs companies visited the role of speakers. We especially spent a lot of time talking to the participants and the question and answer session with representatives of Zabbix.

This community meeting was the fourth in a row. When someone talks about the sequence number of an event, usually they are divided into five or ten. But in our case, I would single out exactly the fourth mitap. Why is he so remarkable? See and read for yourself - welcome under cat.

"How to work effectively with Zabbix"

Oleg Ivanivsky, Zabbix

Oleg is an experienced technical support engineer, Zabbix trainer, consultant and host of Zabbix webinars. He has extensive experience in dealing with critical situations.

The idea to invite him as a speaker is not accidental: last year, during another visit to the Zabbix Conference, my colleagues and I liked his report so much that we thought it would be cool if the same information were available in Russian.

What is remarkable in the report:

• Described popular problems encountered by Zabbix administrators under high (and not so) loads;
• it is told how to solve these problems, or at least what you should pay attention with such symptoms;
• what tools will help in localizing and troubleshooting problems.

The report "is based on real events." This is not a theory - it is a real practice, clearly structured and supported by many examples. We ourselves faced in our installations with similar, so we can safely say: it’s worth watching / listening to everyone who has a monitored infrastructure that is constantly growing and changing.

Judge for yourself: the report lasted 25 minutes, but Oleg was asked questions for another half hour.

"Zabbix Events in Elasticsearch"

Ilya Ableyev, Badoo (i)

A year ago, at the same meeting, I told you what tools help to respond to emerging problems in our infrastructure. Of course, it was impossible to just silently show screenshots and not describe how it works. I started to correct this mistake and told how we store events (problems that arise) in Elasticsearch. Including described, showed and told, what problems we solve and how this solution can be useful to any user.

During the report, I noticed a lot of nodding heads, reacting to some of my phrases. This allows me to think that the topic is to some extent relevant to the community.

After the talk, I received a lot of tips on “correct” (there were a lot of opinions) of using Elasticsearch and ELK stack in general. This means that we were able to not only tell about what was done, but also improve the decision thanks to live reviews.

“Updates in Grafana-Zabbix Plugin”

Alexander Zobnin, Grafana Labs

Alexander is directly involved in the development of Grafana, as well as the support and development of a plugin for Zabbix. But it was not always so. When we met him three years ago, he did not work at Grafana yet, and he was involved in the development of the project in his spare time. The project was loved by many for the qualities that everyone appreciates in Grafana: fast / beautiful / dynamic graphics (underline the necessary). At about the same time, we called Alexander to tell about this decision on the first mitap, and then on the third - and so he became our regular guest and speaker, who is always asked many questions, because he is the only developer of Grafana Labs from Russia who speaks on such events.

This time, Alexander talked about the new features that have appeared in the plugin lately, looked under the hood and showed how the SQL data sources in Grafana can improve the performance of graph rendering. And he shared his plans for moving the plug-in to the back-end.

"Detailed review of Zabbix 4.0"

Alexey Vladyshev, the creator of Zabbix

And again the column “Permanent Rapporteur mitap”. Two days after our acquaintance (back in 2015), Alexey and I discussed the idea of ​​holding a small mitap in Moscow.


Alexey became the first speaker at our first meeting, and since then he regularly comes, talks about plans and answers community questions.

This time, Alexey spoke in great detail about the new functionality of Zabbix 4.0 and how these innovations can help in solving everyday tasks, and also shared some plans for versions 4.2 and 4.4.

From myself I can add that in the upcoming release there will be many features that we (the Badoo monitoring department) were waiting for and implementing as much as possible on our own: sending notifications to several recipients at the same time, more flexible autoregistration of hosts by tags (for example, depending on the applications running on the host ), more flexible work with the confirmation of problems and many others.

"Zabbix as a security scanner"

Nikolay Samosvat, QIWI

Not a permanent speaker, but not new to our event. This time, Nikolay represented Qiwi and their unique solution, which allows Zabbix to be turned into a security scanner using the Vulners.com service.

If you have been using Zabbix for a long time, then you are aware that many people were interested in security issues: encryption for interacting with various subsystems appeared in Zabbix starting from version 3.0, and up to this point the security personnel were aware of the application with a hint of mistrust. So, in that case, turning Zabbix into a solution that guards the safety of your infrastructure is an idea in a million.

Q & A session about Zabbix with Alexey Vladyshev and Oleg Ivanivsky

We borrowed the idea of ​​such a format from Zabbix Conference.

What is the essence: the participants ask their questions to representatives of the company (into the microphone, that is, everyone will hear), answering several, that is, the choice of topics is quite broad.

By inviting Alexei and Oleg, we made sure that such a session is a great opportunity for participants to be heard, because on the sidelines you cannot always ask your question, and some questions are simply lost in the general stream, and for some you can hear a few answers. time.

The success of the section can be estimated by the number of questions and participants - a whole hour of continuous communication.

Conclusion

Alexey Vladyshev invited everyone to the Zabbix Summit (now called Zabbix Conference), which will be held on October 5-6 in Riga. The renaming of the event is due to the fact that the event turns into something more than just a conference (which are held around the world).

Who knows, maybe next time you will be taken not to the next meeting, but to the whole Zabbix Moscow Conference (but this is not certain :)). Follow the news and join our group at meetup.com !



Look for photos from mitap in our publics in FB and VK .

See you again!