Product Description Document Network Monitoring Solution 924,Navjeevan Bldg No 03 9 th Floor Lamington Road Mumbai 400 008 Ph: +91 9167104998 Email: naushad@acutesolutions.in
1. Overview IT monitoring has become the most strategically important constituent part of any enterprise process reliant on technology. It may not be immediately apparent to the staff on the shop floor and management at head office how vast numbers of servers, PCs, CCTV camera, printers and network cabling adds tangible value to the bottom line. After all, the IT estate only exists to support the people and processes that your people have increasingly become reliant on to carry out business as usual. Ever increasing reliance of business on mission critical IT infrastructure like CRM, ERP, websites, DMS voice logger make it imperative to organizations to proactively monitor the IT system not only for remedial of issues but for capacity planning as well. Unplanned downtimes of IT infrastructure mean impact on the bottom line and customer satisfaction Cost of downtime is High! Accute Solutions has been engaged in developing and managing the network monitoring tools CxZabbix. CxZabbix is distribution (distro) of Zabbix an enterprise grade open source network monitoring solution for networks and applications. The distro includes the Zabbix modules and add on modules developed by Accute solution which enables enhanced notification, ddns, sms notifications and many more. Acute solution also involved in porting and supporting the Zabbix on many Single board computing machines in order to eliminate the requirement of dedicated PCs to run the monitoring tool even for monitoring a couple of hosts. In a very short span of time Zabbix has become a leading software in proactive monitoring category. It has been nominated for the 2 nd time as best monitoring solution according to Gartner. CxZabbix monitors numerous parameters of a network and the health and integrity of servers. It uses a flexible notification mechanism that allows users to configure e-mail based alerts for virtually any event. This allows a fast reaction to server problems. It offers excellent reporting and data visualisation features based on the stored data. This makes Zabbix ideal for capacity planning. The solution supports both polling and trapping. All Zabbix reports and statistics, as well as configuration parameters, are accessed through a web-based frontend. A web-based frontend ensures that the status of your network and the health of your servers can be accessed from any location even from Internet. Properly configured, Zabbix can play an important role in monitoring IT infrastructure. This is equally true for small organisations with a few servers and for large companies with a multitude of servers. CxZabbix is a linux based cross platform solutions which can be deployed in small environment like upto 10 hosts and can be scaled to monitor up to thousands of hosts. The server can be deployed on dedicated linux PC, VMware, Virtual box or embedded devices with ARM processors. The subsequent chapters of this document will explain nitigrities like features, architecture etc.
CxZabbix is also referred as Zabbix in this document. 1.1. Major Functionalities 2. Collect Data from host over varied protocols like IPMI, SNMP etc 3. Automated Device Management addition and removal of hosts based on certain rules 4. Web monitoring 5. Manage data store historical data for predefined period of time 6. Alerts via popups, emails and SMS 7. Visualise Dashboards, Graphs 1.2. Features 1.2.1. Monitor everything Using Zabbix, you can easily monitor servers, network devices and applications, gathering accurate statistics and performance data. 1.2.2. Performance Monitoring performance indicators like CPU, memory, network, disk space and processes can be done easily with Zabbix agent, which is available for Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms. It is a native process and does not require a specific environment like Java or.net. 1.2.3. Agentless Monitoring Zabbix agent is a great way to monitor servers, but it is not always possible to deploy it. For those situations Zabbix supports multiple agent-less monitoring approaches. You can check availability and the responsiveness of standard services such as e-mail or web servers without installing any software on the monitored devices. 1.2.4. Network Devices Zabbix supports SNMP agents, present in all network devices like routers and switches. So Zabbix can help you with monitoring and capacity planning on your network providing key figures such as network utilization, CPU, memory and port status. In addition, Zabbix can monitor any other device with an SNMP agent like network appliances, storages, cooling and power systems. 1.2.5. VMware Monitoring
VMware virtual machine monitoring allows monitoring VMware vcenter and vsphere installations for various VMware hypervisor and virtual machine properties and statistics. Zabbix can use low-level discovery rules to automatically discover VMware hypervisors and virtual machines and create hosts to monitor them, based on pre-defined host prototypes. Ready to use templates can be applied to start monitoring the virtual components quickly. 1.2.6. Monitor Databases Databases have been one of the IT pillars for decades. There's rarely a company without a single database. They hold important data, including financial, customer and employee information. It is a crucial need to know not only whether a database is available, but also how it is doing. Using Zabbix it is possible to monitor in great detail any database, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. 1.2.7. Built-in Java Application Server Monitoring Zabbix provides the ability to monitor Java application servers over JMX directly - no need for 3rd party modules or integration layers anymore. Monitor JBoss, Tomcat, Oracle Application Server or any others with the efficient Zabbix Java gateway. 1.2.8. Web Services Databases are great and important, but they do not mean the information is actually accessible. More often than not the distribution of the information today happens through a website or a web-based IT system. To help you ensure continuous operation of these systems, Zabbix provides a built-in web monitoring support. Using this feature you can define sequential steps that Zabbix should take when analysing a website. This feature allows to easily monitor availability, response time and download speed of your external website, e-commerce portal or internal wiki and service desk system. 1.2.9. Hardware Monitoring If the hardware provides IPMI access, Zabbix can gather statistics such as temperature, fan speed voltage, and disk state, avoiding downtime and financial losses. Furthermore, Zabbix can run IPMI commands to turn on or off devices over the network when an issue occurs.
Supported Protocols For Monitoring 1 SNMP v1, V2, v3 2 Proprietary protocol for Zabbix Agent 3 IPMI 4 TCP 5 ICMP 6 SSH 7 HTTP/HTTPS 8 FTP 9 JSON for Zabbix API 10 JMX 11 SMTP 12 POP 13 Telnet Readily Available monitoring templates 1 Linux OS 2 Solaris OS 3 Windows OS 4 FreeBSD OS 5 OpenBSD OS 6 AIX OS 7 HP-UX OS 8 Networking 9 MySQL 10 LDAP 11 SMTP 12 IMAP 13 POP 14 FTP 15 NTP 16 ICMP 17 SNMP Device 18 SNMP Disks 19 Tomcat 20 VMWare 21 SNMP Generic 22 Custom Templates
1.2.10. Distributed Monitoring Have remote branch offices, data centers or client sites that should be monitored, but you want to keep connection and open port count as low as possible? No problem, Zabbix distributed monitoring will handle that. In addition to the single, central server model, Zabbix also offers easy to set up and nearly maintenancefree distributed monitoring with Zabbix proxies. The proxy has been serving Zabbix users for many years now, and it is a very robust solution. Zabbix proxy can help with monitoring large data centers efficiently, and it can also be run on embedded hardware for smaller environments. Preconfigure a Zabbix proxy, ship it to the remote location to be plugged in - and from then on manage all the proxy configuration from the central Zabbix server. In addition to making the monitoring of remote locations easy, proxies also help greatly with scaling for large environments. 1.2.11. SMS Notification CxZabbix allows users of the system to receive SMS notifications in case of disaster and critical classified issues. This ensures that stakeholders are immediately informed of the issue immediately as it occurs as to take remedial action promptly. SMS alerts are sent to the configured list of numbers once the issue is restored. Disclaimer:- customer needs to buy the SMS pack from external SMS service provider. Currently, CxZabbix is integrated and tested with SMSgatewayhub.com. Alternatively, customer can authorize Acute to purchase the transactional SMS pack on its behalf. However, based on TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) customer has to sign the declaration to the SMS service provider assuring the connection shall not be used for Spamming and promotions using transactional SMS pipe. 1.2.12. Mobile Clients/Apps Various free mobile app to support Zabbix and CxZabbix for Android, IPhone, IPad and Windows Phone are available from Google Playstore, Apple AppStore and Windows Marketplace respectively. One of the application tested on CxZabbix is Zabbkit. Disclaimer: - the mobile clients are developed and managed by their respective developers
Android Mobile App IPad Mobile App Windows Phone Mobile App
1.2.13. Visualization The solution extends a suite of intuitive graphs and dashboards which projects the historical data and gives a clear visibility and granularity in the resource usage, availability and performance. Some of the screen shots are given below:- Zabbix Dashboard
Zabbix Dashboard with Mouseover details Triggers
Triggers and Host Status Zabbix Server performance
Host CPU utilization graph Host Memory Usage Graph
Disk usage
2. Architecture CxZabbix can be deployed in various ways centralized where a dedicated CxZabbix Server directly communicates with the hosts and devices. This architecture is suitable when CxZabbix Server and monitored devices and hosts are directly reachable over LAN or WAN. The hosts and devices can be monitored using Zabbix agents or agentless via standard protocols like SNMP, IPMI, TCP Port check, ICMP etc or mix of agent and agentless modes. It can be deployed in a distributed architecture where CxZabbix server do not communicate with devices and hosts directly but via a Zabbix proxy(ies). In this architecture hosts and devices are communicating with proxy only and proxy in turn sends the collated data to CxZabbix server periodically. This deployment mode is appropriate where the number of devices and hosts are very huge or where there is no direct connectivity between server and hosts or the hosts are behind a firewall without a static public IP. 2.1. Centralized Architecture
2.2. Distributed Monitoring 2.2.1. Dynamic DNS Update:- A small enterprises having various remote sites like branch office, showrooms, warehouses etc have typically challenge having the sites not connected over WAN as generally the internet is extended over DSL, Cable Internet, Mobile Internet etc. As a result there is not static public IP available on which the server can access the site.
Accute solutions overcomes this limitation by combining Zabbix proxy and Dynamic DNS update technologies. In this approach a DDNS software developed by Acute keeps running behind firewall, or internet router which keeps detecting the dynamic public IP assigned by the ISP. Periodically this software module which can run on any server at the remote site preferably on the machine on which Zabbix Proxy is running, will update the IP address against the subdomain or domain name in the DNS service provider s DNS. Any outside server from the internet can now send a DNS resolve query to get the dynamic IP and communicate with the remote site. The Zabbix proxy should be either deployed in DMZ or leverage port forwarding or virtual server functionality of the Internet Router. The below diagram depicts how DDNS works:-
2.3. System Requirement CxZabbix runs on a varied of hardware that includes Intel x86 PCs with linux OS, Embeded Devices, Single board computers. CxZabbix can be deployed on Windows PC using Free virtualization tools like VMware Player and Oracle Virtual Box. Typical System Requirement as follows:- Name Platform CPU/Memory Core Software Stack Monitored hosts Small Linux 32 bit Medium Linux 64 bit Large Linux 64 bit Very large Linux 64 bit PIII 500 MHz 512MB MySQL, Apache and PHP 20 AMD Athlon 3200+ 4GB Intel Dual Core 6400 8GB Intel Xeon 2xCPU 16GB MySQL, Apache and PHP 500 RAID10 MySQL, Apache and PHP RAID 10 MySQL, Apache and PHP >1000 >10000
Single Board Low Cost Machines Raspberry Pi 700 Mhz ARM processor 512 MB RAM 100 Mbps Ethernet port 4 USB ports HDMI port Audio 3.5mm jack Micro usb power port Banana pi ARM Cortex Processor 1 Ghz 1 GB RAM HDMI port Audio 3.5mm jack Gigabit Ethernet 2 USB ports Cubietruck ARM Cortex A7 Dual Core processor 2 GB RAM HDMI & VGA video output Gigbit Ethernet SATA 2.0 interface 2 USB ports Wifi Chipset
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