Eager to know about triggers in the Zabbix monitoring system? We can help you.

Triggers are the conditions set on servers for generating alerts. The common triggers alert when the server has high load, disk usage, high mail flow, etc.

At Bobcares, we often get requests regarding Zabbix, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Engineers set triggers to monitor servers effectively.

A glance through Zabbix

Zabbix is a monitoring software tool. It can be deployed for agent-based and agentless monitoring.

Here, agentless means, we can monitor any server without installing the Zabbix agent on that server.

Moreover, Zabbix is based on a client-server model.

This is used to monitor different aspects of server infrastructure like DB monitoring, application monitoring, Network monitoring, server monitoring, etc.

What are the Triggers in Zabbix?

Triggers represent the current system state. That is, it gives alert regarding services whether they are up or down.

Also, these are the logical expressions that evaluate the data from the server and give alerts accordingly.

Zabbix always generates popups based on triggers we set.

This evaluates the data at some conditions collected by items to generate notifications or popups.

Here, the item is a value read from a host. And these items are used to gather the system data.

How do we add a trigger?

Recently, one of our customers approached us with a request to add the basic triggers in his Zabbix.

So, our Dedicated Engineers followed the steps below:

Firstly, we logged into his Zabbix dashboard. Then we get a panel like the one shown below:

Then we followed the path Configuration>>hosts>>triggers

Under the trigger, select the create trigger option.

Then appears the main trigger creation screen, there we give a name for the trigger, select the severity for the trigger.

Also, create the expression for the trigger by using the item from the list.

That is: Select the item>> select the function to check for the item

And lastly, give the value for the trigger specifying when the trigger is to activate.

There we can see many other optional options.

Finally,  click on the add button.

This way, we add triggers for the customers.

For example, a trigger for Lack of available memory on server {HOST.NAME}, the expression will be

{xxxxhost:vm.memory.size[available].last(0)}<10M

Need custom triggers for the server?

Fortunately, Zabbix allows for creating custom triggers as well.

Our Support Engineers create custom triggers according to our customers’ requirements. For that, we create custom codes for items and add them to according files.

This depends on where we need to fetch the data. Usually, we fetch data from the following MySQL, Nginx and Apache files.

For MySQL triggers like number of users online, maximum connections, we customize the file /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.d/userparameter_mysql.conf

Similarly, for Apache related parameters like maximum processes, online visitors count, etc. we edit the file /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.d/userparameter_zapache.conf.

Then we create the item and follow the same steps above for adding the trigger.

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Conclusion

In this write-up, we saw Zabbix triggers explained in a simple way. Also, we discussed how our Support Engineers help customers in adding the trigger.