zxview

This is a replacement for the Zabbix Dashboard which is easier to look at (depends) and it also has a few little helpers to improve the overview if you've got a bigger setup. Like:

• hiding all hosts in maintenance
• toggle display of selected groups/hostgroups
• show all active and hide all exired maintenances after 2 hours
• customizable colors for each group for easier estimation of importance
• new problems will be highlighted some time

zxview uses the Zabbix JSON API to periodically pull all info.

Tryout

    $ git clone http://github.com/allan/zxview.git
    $ cd zxview/test
    $ ruby -rrubygems app.rb # gem install sinatra yajl-ruby
    $ open http://localhost:4567/zxview.html # and fill in some nonsense user/pw

Installation

• Get all the files and put them in a directory your Zabbix webserver can access. You have to serve these files from your Zabbix webserver, because zxview uses XMLHTTPRequests and your browser is only allowed to make those AJAX things to the same domain from which the HTML file was served (since Zabbix doesn't support JSONP and setting up an extra proxy for those things is annoying). Since 99% of all Zabbix-installations will use Apache and the Apache configuration is annoying too, here's a snippet

  $ cat /etc/httpd/conf.d/zxview.conf
  Alias /zxview /path/to/zxview
  
  <Directory "/path/to/zxview">
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride None
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
  </Directory>
  

• use a newer Google Chrome build to view the page. Zabbix's frontends/php/api_jsonrpc.php doesn't handle every Content-type it gets and Chrome is the only browser that by chance uses the Content-type that Zabbix's JSON API requires. Other browsers append a charset=UTF-8, which then won't be matched by Zabbix.

  --- api_jsonrpc.php.original      2010-03-23 14:59:32.000000000 +0100
  +++ api_jsonrpc.php       2010-03-23 15:00:00.000000000 +0100
  @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
  
  $allowed_content = array(
                                  'application/json-rpc'          => 'json-rpc',
                                  'application/json'                      => 'json-rpc',
  +                               'application/json; charset=UTF-8;'      => 'json-rpc',
                                  'application/jsonrequest'       => 'json-rpc',
  //                             'application/xml-rpc'           => 'xml-rpc',
  //                             'application/xml'                       => 'xml-rpc',
  

• Since the Zabbix API doesn't use cookies for authentication, everytime you reload the page, a login dialog will be shown.

• In the Zabbix Admin Interface you need to setup a user with the proper rights to acces the Zabbix API. There is a special group for API access I believe. readonly rights are sufficient. After setting up the user, you can test the API access with curl:

  $ zabbixuser="..." zabbixpass="..." zabbixserver="..."
  $ export zabbixuser zabbixpass zabbixserver
  $ curl -s -i -d '
  { "auth":null
  , "method":"user.authenticate"
  , "id":0
  , "params":
    { "user":"'$zabbixuser'"
    , "password":"'$zabbixpass'"
    }
  , "jsonrpc":"2.0"
  }' \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -k https://$zabbixserver/zabbix/api_jsonrpc.php
  

  The output of this command should look something like this:

  {"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":"8d4a5d5a5a63888e9273baeafa227","id":0}
  

  For later use, you could copy&paste the result, e.g.

  $ export authtoken="8d4a5d5a5a63888e9273baeafa227"
  

• Now you can login to the API. Check if your user has the proper rights to view some hosts:

  $  curl -s -d '
  { "auth":"'$authtoken'"
  , "method":"host.get"
  , "id":0
  , "params":
    { "select_groups": true
    , "extendoutput": true
    }
  , "jsonrpc":"2.0"
  }' \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -k https://$zabbixserver/zabbix/api_jsonrpc.php
  

• At this point zxview should already run.

zxview customization

• In zxview you can give your hostgroups different colors. To do that you have to edit the first lines of the file zxview.js:

  { // if you want to give a special color to a specific hostgroup          
    "sample Hostgroup": { displayname: "prod", color: "#3dbc34" },
    "another name":     { displayname: "qa",   color: "#f370ff" },
  
    "others":           { displayname: "allHosts",  color: "#e7a000" } 
  }
    ^                     ^                         ^
    |                     |    _____________________|
    |                     |   |_.- the HTML color for the hostgroup                  
    |                     |_____.- short name to display on page (only
    |                              alphanumeric chars allowed, no spaces or
    |                              else)                    
    |___________________________.- this must be the *exact* hostgroup
                                   name like it is configured in Zabbix
  

  (Yes! ;)

• All hosts that are viewable by the user configured for API access will be in the group others which exists only in zxview. If you delete this group without adding some other group nothing will be displayed.

• If you have a common domain name scheme, for example all your configured hosts end with the same domain, it can be helpful for the overview to delete the domainpart. To do this search for {HOSTNAME} in zxview.js

Maintenances

If you've got a lot of maintenances, some maybe scheduled repeatedly, and you don't want to see them in the list of maintenances, put the string 'zx.filtered' somewhere in the description of the actual maintenance.

Screenshot

Todo

• test
• external config file