6 reasons to call Nobius 2/6
In this 2nd blog on 6 reasons to call Nobius, well a good reason is that 2 days ago Zabbix released version 6.
It’s simply the most powerful license-free software you can adopt.
Yesterday I introduced #Nobius and our relationship with Zabbix. What we do and how we can help those interested. Read it here https://nobius.co.uk/6-reasons-to-call-nobius-1-6/
The blog image I’ve used shows you all of the 6 reasons to call Nobius, but you don’t HAVE to wait until all 6 have been posted to call us, we’re always ready to discuss your issues, requirements, timing, budget, and objectives. Any time.
I’ll go into detail here on the 2nd of the 6 posts which explains what’s new in Zabbix v6 and what we think is the value to you.
BSM
What is it
First its a term used prolifically by some vendors and analysts in the early 2000s. Business Service Monitoring or Management was as usual a marketing buzzword for quite a while.
BSM defined a shift in the focus of monitoring. Its objective was and still is to assist IT teams to move from being reactive. With it the become more business focused and service orientated.
It complements IT Monitoring and ITSM because it adds monitoring that focuses on business health and connects that to the other types of monitoring.
A good solution certainly must provide a means to interconnect the health of dependent objects and correlate to find the root cause. 20 years ago that meant either using rules or complex CMDB driven dependency mapping were used. A CMDB (Common Management Data Bases) can be very tough to create and to be kept up to date. That can be done effectively using discovery probes, and intelligent agents. Usually, it can also be done manually, but needs a lot of attention. It’s usually pretty expensive software to buy and maintain.
BSM in #Zabbix v6
BSM features in Zabbix software provide the means to correlate multiple events and find the root cause without a CMDB.
Zabbix uses using dependency declarations in service trees instead.
Here’s a couple of examples.
BSM Value
To explain the value this provides, I will show you a couple of examples.
Example 1
Let’s say you have an E-Commerce application with a web front end.
It has credit check built in that is a 3rd party service integrated into the application.
With Zabbix we can monitor your application via its web site, and capture response times from the different stages of sessions.
Let’s say the credit check section suddenly degrades taking 10x longer than normal.
It could be due to your application, the network connecting to the credit authority, their application / service, or your web site.
If that isn’t detected ultimately users will complain, or switch to another service / vendor.
NEVER use your customers to do monitoring, don’t wait for them to call because chances are many won’t.
Properly set up BSM monitoring in Zabbix will of course capture that service degradation.
When using a BSM model that correlates that event with network data from the link to the credit check service provider, we can see immediately if the issue is due the application, the network SP or the subcontractor.
Normally this BSM monitoring will detect the business issue before any users do and because of that focus IT operators on the issue raised.
Example 2
Now imagine another case where public users access the library.
Traffic is quite intense, but not at night.
Now let’s say that a server for book catalog management has a disk issue.
Zabbix can detect that the user service has issues and correlate that with the appropriate server status including disk space and performance.
Depending on contingency Zabbix could automate a configuration change to switch to a different storage system and restart the service.
Given the issue happened at night, the service would be ready next morning. Here BSM value is strong because no staff were called out and a report is in their email the next day.
BSM Value – The result is IT staff spend less time weeding through symptoms, and are taken straight to the root cause.
Definitely useful, we think BSM its essential, and now its standard in license-free Zabbix version 6.
High Availability with Zabbix Server clusters
Now native Zabbix high availability features include Zabbix server clusters without using any 3rd party tools.
Zabbix administrators can now deploy single or multiple standby nodes to ensure zero downtime during unplanned outages, server upgrades, or other maintenance tasks. Pragmatically this means a higher SLA, less downtime and better service delivered to your users and customers.
Nobius has been designing and deploying H.A. solutions with Zabbix for several years. Now this out of the box feature saves time and adds native Zabbix support for H.A. installations.
As usual, those installations can be on your premise and resources or deployed in the cloud, as you like.
Another one of the 6 reasons to call Nobius, we can guide you if you are not sure.
Machine Learning
Now there’s another buzz word that doesn’t always translate to value in some vendors’ software.
In the case of Zabbix v6 it does because they’ve
applied it to anomaly detection and baseline monitoring.
This becomes more flexible than ever as because of clever new trend functions that utilize the machine learning approach to detect anomalies and deviations from metric baseline values.
Pragmatically it means you can see the actual value of a metric, and its baseline “normal” behaviour based on learning over time. Thus if any measurement shows a value outside the orange sleeve then an anomaly is detected and an event raised.
This an excellent addition because it greatly reduces false positive, events raised when they’re not useful.
This is at least a huge time saving function, and its likely that most IT operations teams simply never have the time to study trends over time. In any case they could never modify the thresholds on an ongoing basis.
This dynamic baselining is excellent use of Zabbix computing power and a very valuable addition to version 6.
Kubernetes Monitoring
Zabbix v6 adds support of pod, node, and Kubernetes internal component monitoring.
So now you can now use the official Kubernetes templates to monitor your Kubernetes instances on multiple levels.
Geomaps
The new widgets introduced in Zabbix 6.0 grant many new ways to display the collected metrics and the monitored infrastructure state.
A great way to help IT Operators determine impact is to deploy geomaps to track the status of hosts based on longitude and latitude superimposed on a graphic image of a site, zone, district, country etc.
How Nobius can help
If you’re already using older versions, that another one of the 6 reasons to call Nobius.
Contact us to help you migrate, and see our Punch Pubs & Co case study – Nobius v2-1 to read how we migrated that customer to Zabbix
If you’re not then it doesn’t take much to start using this most powerful, license-free software.
It’s enterprise grade software meaning its stable, reliable, has scalability, high performance with distributed monitoring, and its secure.
It’s also integrated with practically all popular software you may use for ITSM, collaboration, containers, automation, help desk and so much more. See them here https://pos.li/2kn251
Yes Zabbix 6 is an amazing software package, incredible license free value. Our kickstart service is a perfect way to define a fixed scope and have a system running in no time, on premise or hosted.
Nobius provides you with amazing hosted services that get you up and running fast and will suit your budget.
Explore what’s new in Zabbix 6.0 LTS: https://zabbix.com/whats_new_6_0
Reach out to info@Nobius.co.uk and see our introductory video @ http://pos.li/2kn252
Learn who #Nobius has already provided value to at http://pos.li/2kn24y
Nobius.co.uk
Recent Comments