Optimising Hybrid Environment Monitoring with Zabbix

The Partnership

At ICT Solutions, we are dedicated to providing fully managed IT support across the UK. To deliver the highest standard of service to our 160+ clients, we rely on robust, cutting-edge technologies.

A core part of our service delivery involves comprehensive network and infrastructure monitoring. To achieve this, we proudly utilise Zabbix – an enterprise-class open-source monitoring solution – and collaborate closely with Zabbix Premium Delivery Partner, Opensource ICT Solutions. Together, we ensure that our clients have absolute visibility and solid insights into their varied IT environments.

The Challenge

Historically, our team deployed Raspberry Pi 3 devices on-site to act as Zabbix proxies. However, as our clients’ networks expanded – now totalling over 3,000 workstations and 1,300 network devices – managing hundreds of physical proxies became a logistical challenge.

Furthermore, as monitoring demands intensified, the aging Pi 3 hardware began to experience performance drops. A critical bottleneck was their reliance on SD cards, which are prone to failure when overloaded with the constant database writes required by the Zabbix proxy software.

The Solution

To overcome these hardware limitations and streamline our Managed IT Services, our engineering team spearheaded a comprehensive upgrade of our monitoring infrastructure, leveraging the latest features from Zabbix:

• Hardware Refresh: We phased out the older hardware, ordering and deploying highly capable Raspberry Pi 5 devices to client sites to handle increased data loads effortlessly.
• Automated Deployment: We deployed Ansible and harnessed Semaphore to fully automate proxy management. Now, our field engineers simply connect the device on-site, push a button, and the proxy is automatically secured, configured, and integrated into our central Zabbix environment.
• Software Optimisation with Zabbix 7.0: The release of Zabbix 7.0 introduced the highly anticipated ProxyBufferMode=hybrid feature. We immediately capitalised on this by reconfiguring our edge devices to use the Raspberry Pi’s RAM for the proxy database instead of the SD card.

The Results

By combining upgraded hardware with the powerful new capabilities of Zabbix 7.0, we successfully eradicated the risk of SD card burnout. The system now only writes history metrics to the physical SD card in the event of an extended network outage.

The end result is a highly scalable, easily manageable, and incredibly stable monitoring setup. This allows our support desk to immediately pinpoint faults, provide targeted troubleshooting, and proactively safeguard our clients’ cyber security and operational uptime.

(Curious about how we keep businesses secure and efficient? Read more in our latest IT and tech blogs.)

ICT Solutions – The Partner You Can Trust

Here at ICT Solutions, we are proud to be catalysts for innovation, continually reinvesting in our own systems so that we can foster growth and transformation for our clients.

We cover every aspect of consultancy, infrastructure design, sourcing, installation, and ongoing support. To learn more about our services and how we can help your organisation thrive in the digital age, please contact our friendly team today.