It's great when Zabbix runs smoothly; we get all of the data, nice graphs, and alerts. To keep it running like that, we should follow the health of Zabbix itself, be ready to recover from disastrous events, and upgrade to the latest version every now and then. In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- Monitoring the internals of Zabbix: Caches, busy rates, performance items, and other data that reveals how well Zabbix is feeling
- Making backups: Suggestions on how to create backups and potential restore strategies
- Upgrading Zabbix: How to know what changes to expect from new versions and which components are compatible with others in different versions, and how to perform the upgrade itself
We'll also review generic suggestions regarding Zabbix setup to reduce performance issues and take a look at the audit log, a way to see who made changes to the Zabbix configuration and when, although this feature has some problems that we'll make sure to find out. We'll finish this chapter with a look at all of the configuration parameters in the server, proxy, and agent configuration files, concentrating on the ones we haven't discussed so far.