FreeBSD 10.1 – Zabbix 2.4 monitoring system

Zabbix is an enterprise open source monitoring solution for networks and applications.

The Zabbix monitoring system is divided in 3 sub-systems :
– Zabbix server : Collect and store data from the devices.
– Zabbix frontend : Render the data and manage the web UI.
– Zabbix agent : Run locally on the different devices to be monitored.

In this post, we’ll install everything on a FreeBSD 10.1 running on a Kimsufi KS-1 server.

Note : The Zabbix server is able to monitor devices and services such as routers, shared hosting, cloud services even if they are not running a Zabbix agent.

In this post, we assume that you already have a server with Ngnix, PHP and MySQL running. If not, you can follow this post.

1. Zabbix server

Install :

Launch a MySQL shell :

And create a MySQL user and database for our Zabbix server :

Install the database :

Create and edit a new configuration based on the sample :

Change the following parameters :

Create the log folder as defined earlier in the configuration file :

Edit the rc.conf :

And add the Zabbix server for automatic startup :

Start the server :

And check in the logs if everything went well :

2. Zabbix Frontend

Install :

Configure a vhost of your choice. With this “alias” configuration, we’ll be able to access the zabbix frontend using mydomain.tld/zabbix.

I choose to protect access by htpasswd, so I created an user/password :

Then I just restarted my Nginx server:

Zabbix frontend UI should be reachable using mydomain.tld/zabbix for web based setup.

The installation requires to change some PHP parameters.
Open the php.ini configuration file :

And change the following :

And finally restart the PHP service :

You will need to give the permission to Nginx to write files :

3. Zabbix agent

Install :

Create and edit a new configuration based on the sample :

Change the following :

Edit the rc.conf :

And add the Zabbix agentd for automatic startup :

Start the Zabbix agent service :

And check that everything went fine :

Then you can use the web UI to configure everything !