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What's Zabbix?

  • Distributed monitoring solution
  • GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2
  • Alerts, advanced monitoring, trend analysis, data visualization, actions, RC, JSON API
  • Stores data away from production
    • MySQL
    • PostgreSQL
    • SQLite
    • Oracle / IBM DB2

What can Zabbix do for you?

Collect service quality metrics

  • Uptime
  • Response time
  • Failure rate

Notify you when there’s an issue

  • Be the first to know about down time
  • Identify problems before the users report
  • Get alerted for potential security attack

Troubleshoot your environment

  • Reduce/eliminate guess work during root cause analysis
  • Minimize time to identify problem
  • Measure improvement after introducing a fix

Plan sysadmin tasks

  • Identify optimal maintenance window
  • Hardware projection

Measure success

  • Institution goals (ex. user adoption)
  • Brags

Explore data

  • Monitor anything!

Blackboard Learn Template Suite

Requirements
  • Zabbix Server version 2.0.2 and up (using the latest version is recommended)
  • Zabbix Java Bridge
  • Learn 9.1 with JDK6 and above (tested on SP7 and above)
Templates
  • Application
    • System downtime trigger
    • Statistics
      • Sessions (active, unique authenticated user)
      • Users &Courses (available, unavailable)
      • User activities
      • Assessment attempts / hour
      • Database connection pool usage
    • Security
      • Config changes in conf/ folder
      • Creation of privileged accounts, Logins from unexpected terminal
      • Command-line authentication tool usage
  • Linux / Windows
    • Processor load
    • CPU utilization
    • Memory usage
    • Network usage
    • Disk usage
    • File descriptor usage (Only Linux)
  • Java
    • JMX port check
    • Heap space memory usage
    • Eden space memory usage
    • Tenured space memory usage
    • Survivor space memory usage
    • Non-heap space memory usage
    • GC collection count
    • GC collection time
    • Threads usage
    • OutOfMemoryError, StackOverflowError
  • Tomcat
    • Request processor
      • Average processing time
      • Requests per minute
      • Errors per minute
    • Thread pool
      • Busy
      • Current
      • Max
  • Cache:
    The template allows monitoring some core caches. The cache stats do not become available until the cache is actually used after the server start-up. Depending on your Learn usage, some cache stats will never become available in Zabbix. (Works out-of-the-box for 9.1 SP10 and above, the provided BbPatch required for SP7 through SP9. SP6 and below are not supported.)
  • ActiveMQ:
    Please note that there should be only one ActiveMQ broker. Therefore, the broker metric should be visible on only one of the nodes at a time.
How to deploy Zabbix Blackboard Learn Templates

Refer to this page.

Download

Change log

Date Version Description Download
TBD 0.8
(beta)
  • Oracle database template
  • Redis template
  
3 Apr 2013 0.7
(beta)
  • Added user activities per hour metric in the Learn Application Single Agent template
  • Introduced a naming convention to the template items
  • Removed the BbPatch war file as it's available on Software Update now
 link
4 Feb 2012 0.6
(beta)
  • There's now a single B2 that's compatible with all supported Learn versions
  • Eliminated the need for a settings page in the B2
  • Security monitor items have been moved to "Template Learn Security" template
  • Moved Uptime item from "Template Learn Application Single Agent" to "Template Learn Application" to be able to monitor each node
  • Optimized data sampling frequency of Java items
  • ActiveMQ, caching, and security items are now disabled in the templates by default. They must be enabled manually
  • Updated bundled Zabbix distribution to version 2.0.4
 link
24 Dec 2012 0.5
(beta)
  • Use default database name to avoid error when bbconfig.database.identifier is empty for monitoring database connection usage
  • Added monitoring for admin and stats database connection usage
 link
4 Dec
2012 		0.4
(beta)
  • Removed System Registry database table security monitoring as the logic is not suitable
  • Data sampling frequency tuning
  • Eliminated a possible DB connection leak in the B2
  • Removed monitoring for inactive sessions and inactive guest sessions
  • Updated bundled Zabbix distribution to version 2.0.3
  • Converted the volumetric monitoring of active guest sessions to active authenticated sessions by distinct users
  • Modified templates group name to "Templates Blackboard Learn" - If you're upgrading, please modify the existing templates group from "Blackboard Learn Templates" to "Templates Blackboard Learn" before importing the new templates.
 link
24 Aug 2012 0.3 (beta)
  • The B2 is now compatible with 9.1 SP7 and above
  • Tweaks on items and graphs
  • Populated the description field in triggers
  • Fixed "System Registry Changed" and "Login From Unexpected Terminals" security triggers
  • Added items and a graph for monitoring sessions that exclude guest users
  • Added a graph for Linux file descriptor metrics
  • Availability of BbPatch for enabling cache stats on 9.1 SP7 through 9.1 SP9
 link
24 Jul 2012 0.2 (beta)
  • Changes
    • Fixed JVM compatibility issue. Version 0.1 was compiled with JDK7. Recompiled the B2 with JDK 6.
    • Workaround implemented for ZBX-5363. The import feature is not able to process the usage of items as a max/min value in graphs. Min/max settings have been removed from the graphs in the templates for now.
  • Known issues
    • Cannot import discovery items due to ZBX-5232. The issue is fixed in Zabbix version 2.0.2rc1 and above.
    • ZBX-5136 causes template import failures on Zabbix version 2.0.0. Installing version 2.0.1 fixes the issue.
    • Java Gateway crashes Zabbix server - ZBX-5031. Running version 2.0.2 and above is highly recommended.
    • Security triggers, "System Registry Changed" and "Login From Unexpected Terminals" do not work as expected. Please disable them until next version is available.
    • The B2 is not compatible below SP10
 link
07 Jul 2012 0.1 (beta) First beta release. link
Best practices and tips

Setup notifications
Notifications via email, Jabber, and/or SMS should be setup to get alerted upon critical triggers getting fired. Trigger items are part of the Blackboard Learn templates but the templates do not configure notifications for you. Please refer to the Zabbix documentation on how to set this up.

Create custom screens

Zabbix allows you to create screens to group information from various sources, such as Blackboard Learn templates' items, triggers and graphs from different hosts. This dashboard feature provides quick overview of key metrics that you work with everyday.

View host screens
You're encouraged to create your own screens but Blackboard Learn template suite also comes with templated host screens. They are available to each host linked to the templates. They can be accessed from the host popup menu and the global search results. You can navigate to the host popup menu via "Monitoring -> Overview" menu. Make sure you have "Hosts location" field set to "Left". Click on a host to display the popup menu and select "Host screens".
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