I will first create a class that is used for representing the Zabbix protocol flags (zabbix_flags.py): Subclassing enum.IntFlag is very suitable for this purpose, and enum.auto() can be used to represent the flag values. I have four test functions to check that the flag values work as expected (test_zabbix_flags.py): Let’s create a virtual environment and […]
Even though I’ve used Python programming language on-and-off since about year 2000, I only started paying more attention to specific Python versions around 2016 when I gradually started using Python more seriously in devops. When dealing with different runtime environments it is crucial to know which features are available in which Python versions. This page […]
A long time ago I discovered screen. It made it possible to start applications in Linux and then disconnecting the SSH session, without stopping the applications. It was magic: otherwise the the applications just terminated if the SSH connection was lost. Then I heard about tmux. It was like screen on steroids! I could split […]
Short one: How to make a serial console server (or terminal server) with a Raspberry Pi and USB-serial adapter. Connect the serial port to whatever device you want to use for testing, and use any telnet-compatible client (like PuTTY) to connect to your Pi’s IP address and the configured port (2000, 3000 or 4000 in […]
One of the features of Zabbix proxy is that it can buffer the collected monitoring data if connectivity to Zabbix server is lost. In this post I will show it happening, using packet capture, or packet analysis. Zabbix setup and capturing Zabbix proxy traffic This is the setup in this demo: For simplicity, the agent […]
When configuring monitoring and using templates in Zabbix you often see low-level discovery (LLD) used for finding out the monitored components or features of a host. In this post I will explain how user macros and regular expressions are used in LLD for filtering the discovery results. I’m using the Network Generic Device by SNMP […]
I have created a new application called lopc (Lines of Python Code). It is available for install with pip on PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/lopc/), and the source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/markkuleinio/lopc The app really only counts the number of non-empty and non-comment lines of *.py files in the given directories. These are some features of […]
Here is my short list about the common f-string formatting codes in Python: >>> score = 123.728 >>> f”{score}” ‘123.728’ Minimum field length: >>> f”{score:>10}” ‘ 123.728’ >>> f”{score:<10}” ‘123.728 ‘ >>> f”{score:^10}” ‘ 123.728 ‘ Number of decimals: >>> f”{score:.2f}” ‘123.73’ >>> f”{score:10.2f}” ‘ 123.73’ >>> f”{score:<10.2f}” ‘123.73 ‘ Padded with a character: >>> […]
Let’s see how the Zabbix active agent autoregistration works in the communication. I have configured the Zabbix agent (version 6.2.3) on the Linux host at 192.168.7.17 with this configuration: ServerActive=192.168.7.15 Hostname=Test-agent After restarting the agent, the Zabbix server (version 6.2.3) at 192.168.7.15 logged immediately in /var/log/zabbix/zabbix_server.log: cannot send list of active checks to “192.168.7.17”: host […]
Zabbix API is the way to go when you need to manage Zabbix configurations or get data from Zabbix programmatically. For Python applications one of the community-based libraries is PyZabbix. Note: There is also a package called py-zabbix. That is a different one, not handled in this post. In this post I’ll show: How to […]