There are currently industry standards where automation is practically indispensable, as the tasks involved are often very demanding and exhausting, and human error can have very serious consequences.
At Unikal, we adopt this same philosophy in the field of production system monitoring, where a service outage caused by a preventable fault can result in the partial or total loss of service.
To achieve this objective in the field of monitoring, we rely on a range of fully reliable tools that are widely recognised within the IT industry. At the heart of our system is Zabbix, where we configure all the elements to be monitored and generate the relevant alerts whenever they exceed limits that are considered safe or normal.
Zabbix is a flexible solution.
By default, Zabbix is configured to monitor the basic and essential parameters on a server, such as disk space, CPU usage, memory, etc.
To deliver significant added value at Unikal, we effectively monitor service availability regardless of the nature of the service, and, as mentioned earlier, we do all this using fully autonomous tools.
Nowadays, many applications include an API (Application Programming Interface), which can provide access to information regarding the application’s operational status via HTTP; this enables us to integrate with Zabbix using an API client such as the Python requests module.
There are other tools, such as Selenium, which simulate user interaction using a web browser. This enables us to thoroughly check that the web services of a business-critical application are active and, should they not be, to issue an early warning so that we can minimise or eliminate periods during which the application is unavailable.
In short, regardless of the technology used in your business operations, we can easily adapt the monitoring of these operations to Zabbix.
There is no point in having a good automated monitoring system if we are unable to view the alerts or parameters that require our attention
To prevent this from happening at Unikal, we have opted for Grafana, which, when integrated with Zabbix, provides us with a solution based on graphs and dashboards.
As a standard procedure at AMS Unikal, we carry out a comprehensive system check using the tools described above before the business opens, so that any issues detected can be rectified, thereby preventing any potential business downtime. To this end, we use email alerts and Webhooks for real-time notifications.