Today it is very important that the applications that we put into operation in our companies are not isolated silos, limiting our productivity, efficiency and traceability and, in the case of monitoring, preventing event correlation.
Zabbix is already used to combine different metrics, sensors, database information, etc. from different sources, including cloud monitoring systems such as
AWS CloudWatch, application performance such as
AppDynamics or monitoring logs such as
Logstash.
This is one of our strengths and advantages with our customers, and we are very satisfied with what we can do with it. But many times, even if Zabbix comes to fill a gap in our customers' monitoring systems, they already have some other DevOps tools for they daily work tools such as:
- Automation / orchestration tools like Ansible: you can use Zabbix as an inventory source for Ansible playbooks, being able to use its groups, etc.
- Advanced notification and incident management and communication tools such as: Telegram, Twitter, Slack, FlowDock, Neptune.io, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, Atlassian Confluence, etc. either through scripts or through plugins of the applications themselves.
From this last group, we can use some of these tools as a bridge between many others. Let's put the
example of PagerDuty. If we go to the
integrations page of this tool we see that there is a wide variety of them. Imagine that we want to integrate our Zabbix with the IT
ServiceNow service management system, so that:
- When generating an alarm in Zabbix (we can filter by alarm level, affected services, etc.) we can cause it to generate an incident in PagerDuty, which notifies according to the configuration level service that we have hired (one of the key features of PagerDuty is the different user-scaling options that it offers, depending on the time, type of ticket, etc.).
- This incident on PagerDuty can automatically generate one in ServiceNow being both incidents synchronized through PagerDuty itself... so that we will be integrating Zabbix and ServiceNow!
We can also use very quickly the powerful integration between
Grafana and Zabbix to display data from different sources, in this case the
worldPing tool, that allows us to see if our website is reachable from different parts of the world. Thus, and as an example, we can integrate the data on our servers and CPD with the values and alarms of access to our webs from different parts of the world: