How to Use Zabbix to Monitor an Ubuntu Server

Introduction

Zabbix is an open-source software that monitors the availability and performance of IT infrastructure components. Zabbix server can be installed on any Linux distribution.

Zabbix provides real-time monitoring of thousands of metric data that it fetches from servers, virtual machines, network devices, and web applications. Analyzing the data Zabbix gathers will give you a general idea of the health of your servers and web applications, in addition to helping you detect potential problems before your users report them.

Zabbix has several methods for collecting metrics. These include agentless monitoring of user services and client-server architecture.

To monitor a server and collect data from it, Zabbix uses an agent that gathers data from different services and sends it to the Zabbix monitoring server. Zabbix supports encrypted communication between the monitoring server and its monitored clients. This ensures that your data is transferred securely over the network.

Zabbix provides a web interface that allows you to monitor your servers (also known as Zabbix clients) and their internal services and manage system settings.

In this tutorial, you will install the Zabbix agent on an Ubuntu 22.04 server, and you will use a Zabbix server on another Ubuntu server to monitor it. So that you will have two Ubuntu servers:

• A monitoring server that will have the Zabbix server installed.
• A monitored client that will have the Zabbix agent installed and will be monitored using the Zabbix web interface that's installed on the monitoring server.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial you need:

• Basic knowledge of the Linux command line.

• Zabbix installed on your server. See our How to Install Zabbix on Ubuntu 22.04 guide. If you want an Ubuntu server with Zabbix readily installed, Just visit our website, choose the server’s specifications that fit your needs, and while prompted to choose among the operating systems and the 1-Click Applications we have, choose Zabbix from the dropdown menu, complete your checkout, and in a couple of minutes our algorithms will take care of all the technical aspects smoothly and effortlessly, just for you!

• One Ubuntu 22.04 server with a non-root user with sudo privileges. This is the server you will monitor using your Zabbix server. You can get affordable, and powerful Ubuntu servers from our website, and you can check out our How to access your server using SSH guide to learn how to access your servers and create a sudo user.

Step 1: Installing the Zabbix Agent

To monitor a server using Zabbix, it has to have the Zabbix Agent installed. This agent is a piece of software that gathers monitoring data and sends it to your Zabbix server.

Access the Ubuntu server you wish to monitor using SSH:

ssh your_user@your_server_ip_address

To download and install the latest Zabbix agent, first get the Zabbix repository configuration package. This can be done by downloading the Zabbix.deb file using the wget command. This .deb file will be used to add the repository.

Run the following command:

wget https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/6.2/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_6.2-2%2Bubuntu22.04_all.deb

Once the download finishes, you can