MuckNet

I’ve been saying I was going to do it for the last 6 months. I finally did it this weekend. I built a demo version of zabbix that I can give full admin rights to. If you’re not familiar with zabbix you can visit my zabbix page , or the zabbix website .

The problem with the old zabbix demo was that it was the only copy. If someone messed it up, I had to manually go in and restore the DB. It didn’t have a self recovery method. In the end, it meant that I was limited to handing out read only access in most cases. That in turn meant it wasn’t used very often by folks, and because it wasn’t used very often, I neglected it.

However! I have now put zabbix into its own VM universe. I took a snapshot of a “clean” zabbix installation, which is known to be good. Every 24 hours, I wipe out the VM instance, put a new one in place, restore the Zabbix DB, and timeshift all the data so it looks like the data is contiguous, even though in all likelyhood its several weeks old. The process results in about 10 minutes of downtime, and another 20 minutes of data processing in the background. Any data displayed from Midnight PST through Midnight PST the following night, is live, accurate, real data, not timeshifted data.

I’m pretty happy with it so far. I still want to add a lot more items and hosts to the demo, but I think its a great start. As far as I know this is the only Zabbix Demo, so I’d love to hear from you what you’d like to see in the demo. More graphs? Screens? Web Monitoring? oracle monitoring? mysql monitoring? Zabbix Tutorials? Walkthroughs? Clever uses for the Demo? Any and all comments appreciated.

Feel free to add new hosts, or even install a zabbix agent on your side and monitor your own server (until midnight that is, when the DB will be reset). I get a lot of hits on my site every day from people searching google for zabbix demo’s. Hopefully this will raise awareness of zabbix and get more people using this excellent tool.

Of course, I can also help you with your zabbix deployment. I can do a custom install for your environment, or I can ship you a pre configured zabbix box that you just plug in and go. If you’d like talk about my zabbix services, please indicate so on the Zabbix Demo form below. Hopefully the form you have to fill out to get access to the zabbix demo isn’t too painful. If you really dislike me for making you fill out a form to get the login credentials, feel free to call me names in every field except the email field. That one happens to be accurate in order to get the login credentials!

Stay tuned over the next several weeks for updates and new features.

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