Getting started

This page describes the step-by-step procedure to install and use Docker Zabbix Sender.

Some commands below supposes your are running on Linux.

Prerequisites

You may have: a Zabbix server installed somewhere, let's say: zabbix.acme.com a machine to install Docker (with root privileges), let's say: docker-daemon.acme.com

Installation

You can skip this section if you use Docker Zabbix Sender as a Docker container

Install Docker 1.5 or higher.
Install Zabbix agent. There is an official zabbix-agent package on most distribution. Makes sure the zabbix-sender executable is in your PATH environment variable.
Edit the /etc/zabbix_agentd.conf and edit the following variable:
- Server=zabbix.acme.com
- Hostname=docker.acme.com
Install latest version of docker-zabbix-sender. shell pip install docker-zabbix-sender

Start a bunch of containers

Now it is time to start a few containers to monitor.

First log as root and make sure the Docker service is running:

service docker start

Now starts 3 minimalistic busybox containers in background :

docker run -d -ti --name container1 busybox
docker run -d -ti --name container2 busybox
docker run -d -ti --name container3 busybox

Configuration on Zabbix server

Zabbix needs a little bit of configuration before being fed with Docker containers statistics.

There are a couple of Zabbix templates available on the GitHub repository: Docker daemon: provides trapper events monitoring the containers (number of running containers, crashed containers, ...) Docker container: provides trapper events, meant to monitor one container (CPU, memory, and network).

Import the 2 templates on your Zabbix server
Add 3 hosts, one for each started containers:
- container1.docker.docker-daemon.acme.com
- container2.docker.docker-daemon.acme.com
- container3.docker.docker-daemon.acme.com
Note the docker prefix between the container name and the hostname.

Note: you will have to specify an agent for those hosts. Zabbix won't talk directly to those machines, so you can put anything you want (the docker-daemon.acme.com IP address for instance) 3. Add the Docker container template to those 3 hosts. 4. Add the docker-daemon.acme.com host if not already registered 5. Register the Docker daemon template to docker-daemon.acme.com

First start

Running as Docker Container

docker run                                          \
    -e ZABBIX_SERVER=zabbix.acme.com>               \
    -e ZABBIX_HOST=docker-daemon.acme.com           \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock    \
    dockermeetupsinbordeaux/docker-zabbix-sender

Installed on a bare-metal server

Run the docker-zabbix-sender command as root (required to deal with Docker API):

docker-zabbix-sender -c /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf --interval 5 --real-time

The executable will collect information about your containers and send them to Zabbix every 5 seconds.

After a couple of seconds, you should see some metrics in Zabbix, in the Monitoring > Latest data page.

There are a couple of basic graphs defined in the Zabbix templates. you should take a look at it.

Is it really working?

You can play with the CPU activity of one of the container and see if this is propagated to Zabbix.

# docker exec -ti container1 sh
/ # while true; do usleep 200; done

Keep it running and observe the peak on Zabbix.