Simple Zabbix tunning tips

If you're getting gaps on ZABBIX's graphs and unknown status on some items, a little to often it might mean that you're monitoring server is low on performance, here are some general rules you can follow to boost ZABBIX performance:

• If the DB is located on the same host as zabbix, change zabbix_server.conf so it uses a Unix socket to connect to the DB

• Increase the number of pollers, trapers and pingers on the server config but don't overdo it.
  
  • General rule - keep value of this parameter as low as possible. Every additional instance of zabbix_server adds known overhead, in the same time, parallelism is increased. Optimal number of instances is achieved when queue, on average, contains minimum number of parameters (ideally, 0 at any given moment). This value can be monitored by using internal check zabbix[queue] or you can look at "Administration -> Queue" on the web interface.
• increase the number of processes on the agents configuration, again, don't overdo it.
• Change some of the items to use active checks (leave a few as regular checks so you can get availability information, leave stuff like host status as a regular check). Remember that the hostname set on the zabbix agent conf file must match the hostname given to the host on the web interface.
  
  • A regular check is initiated by ZABBIX server, it periodically sends requests to an agent to get latest info. The agent is passive, it just processes requests sent by the server.
  • An active check works the following way. ZABBIX agents connect to ZABBIX server to get a list of all checks for a host. Then, periodically, send required information to ZABBIX server. Note that ZABBIX server does not initiate anything. ZABBIX agent does all active work. This doesn't require polling on server side, thus it significantly (1.5x-2x) improve performance of ZABBIX server but if the host goes down the server won't get any information.
• monitor required parameters only
  
  However the most important tunning you have to make is to the DB server, in my next post I'll give you some advice on how to tune a MySQL server to boost ZABBIX performance.