Summary

In this chapter, we departed a bit from the low-level monitoring of CPU, disks, and memory. We discussed a higher level of monitoring, one that looked at business services, called IT services in Zabbix. We were able to configure a service tree to represent real-life dependencies and structures, link individual entries to triggers to propagate problem states to services, and configure SLA calculation for those services. We didn't have a large IT system to test against, so we sent in fake data and observed the resulting reports, including a service availability report and yearly SLA graph.

We noted two important facts about IT service functionality in Zabbix:

• Triggers with a severity of Not classified or Information are ignored when calculating the SLA.
• SLA information can't be calculated at a later time—the IT services must be configured in advance.

For those cases when a service doesn't have full-time SLA coverage, we learned about a way to specify when the SLA calculation should take...