This afternoon was spent on searching for ways to auto-register clients and assign them into different policies based on whether they’re virtual or not and, to my surprise, I couldn’t find an out-of-the-box way of achieving this with Zabbix.
After looking into different Zabbix agent calls and modules, I found a way I could use to reliably tell whether it’s a baremetal machine or not.
Nowadays almost every website provides an encrypted way of communication between itself and end user. I would love to say it’s because web administrators these are concerned about their visitors’ data safety but, while that might also be true in some cases, browsers these days will show a big “ERRRR, SOMETHING’S WRONG!” warning message when we try to connect to a non-HTTPS website.
While obtaining the certificates is pretty much free nowadays (as long as we’re OK with the amount of trustworthiness we get by running a Let’s Encrypt! certificate) and some providers will even help us put them in the right place, we still have to remember to renew our certificates every now and then. If we don’t then, oh well. We’re back to square one because having expired certificate is as good as having no certificate at all when it comes to browsers screaming at us.
It’s a great feeling to have a server! It’s lovely to have it running. It’s nice to know that it’s running. It’s not so nice to come back after few days just to find out our server has, in fact, decided to stop running.
In this article, I’d like to walk you through basic Zabbix installation on a new VM so in future we can set up some alerts that are going to warn us when something funny is happening to our precious website!
Unless the monitoring dies as well, of course…