ericsysmin's DevOps Blog

Integrating Zabbix w/Slack for Channel Notifications

I’ve been using Slack and Zabbix now for a few years, and figured since there’s not too many guides out there on how to integrate the two easily. I know there are a few examples so far, but this is what’s worked best for me.

First I use this script, and put it in your alertscripts directory, ex.   /usr/lib/zabbix/alertscripts .

Notice there’s no field for credentials. That’s because over time I found it easier to deploy with a configuration file that was in yaml format.

Make sure you create an API token for slack by creating a Slack App, then using it’s Verification Token. Hopefully in the future I revisit this and make use of the Client ID, Client Secret, Signing Secret configuration.

So to provide that file we need to create the following in your zabbix configuration directory ex.  /ext/zabbix/slack.yml .

This makes it easier at least for me to deploy and separate configuration from the script itself.

Next steps include creating the Slack Media Type.

Navigate to Administration > Media types

Select “Create media type”, and fill out the following:

 

Don’t forget to save!

Your first value is going to be “Channel” the rest fill in the message details.

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DevOps Really…..

What is DevOps?

DevOps is not one thing, its a plethora of ideas, and practices that have revolutionized Operations and the Release Process. It’s a culture change. DevOps is using development practices and applying them to operations. Then using those methods to automate everything.  It starts to join both Operations and Development together, consider it as a hybrid, I mean it is DevOps, it’s the joining of Development and Operations. DevOps was created to empower developers to quickly integrate and build environments to test code, and allows the operations teams to quickly deploy and monitor applications just as fast as the developers and QA teams can approve it, thus leading to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. DevOps teams that I have started tend to do well with another great practice called Scrum, which are just as important to operations as it is to development, if you don’t believe me try it for a month, then see how effective your team starts becoming. As you may have noticed many of these things are part of Agile practices, if you aren’t familiar hopefully reading and following this blog you will be. DevOps and Agile go hand in hand. DevOps helps reach the goals of Agile effectively, also much easier. You don’t want Operations to be a blocker….that looks bad…wait…it looks really bad.

Some extremely popular concepts come into play here.

  • Scrum
  • Operations Early
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • Automate Everything
  • Test Driven Development for Ops (CircleCI, TravisCI, etc.)
  • Integrated Operations
  • Pets vs. Cattle

Over the next few weeks I will cover all of these, and hopefully more. There’s just way too much to type up in one blog post, and all of it is important (I mean there’s entire books written about this stuff, there’s even series of books written about these practices).

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