Andrea Dalle Vacche - Mastering Zabbix

Andrea Dalle Vacche is a highly skilled IT Professional with over 12 years of industry experience. He graduated from Univerista' degli Studi di Ferrara with an Information Technology certification. This laid the technology foundation, which Andrea has built on ever since. He has acquired various other industry respected accreditations, which include Cisco, Oracle, RHCE, ITIL, and of course Zabbix. Throughout his career he has worked on many large-scale environments, often in roles which have been very complex on a consultant basis. This has further enhanced his growing skill set, adding to his practical knowledge base and concreting his appetite for theoretical technical study. His love for Zabbix came from his time spent in the Oracle world as a Database Administrator/Developer. His time was spent mainly reducing "ownership costs" with specialization in monitoring and automation. This is where he came across Zabbix and the flexibility, both technically and administratively, it offered. Using this as a launch pad, it inspired Andrea to develop Orabbix, the first open source software to monitor Oracle completely integrated with Zabbix.

Andrea has published a number of articles on Zabbix-related software such as DBforBIX. His projects are publicly available on his website http://www.smartmarmot.com. Currently, Andrea is working for a leading global investment bank in a very diverse and challenging environment. His involvement is vast and deals with many aspects of the Unix/Linux platforms as well as paying due diligence to many different kinds of third-party software, which are strategically aligned to the bank's technical roadmap.

First, I would like to thank my wife Anna for her support and encouragement during the writing of this book. I highly appreciate her help and advice. Many thanks to Fifi for her relaxing company and fluffy stress relief. I am grateful to my ex-boss Giovanni for his patience when I used to fill his mailbox with odd Zabbix test messages. It was nice having been cheered up by my friends and colleagues: Bav with his precious suggestions and Antonio always ready to encourage me. Special thanks to the Packt Publishing team: Abhijit, Nikhil, Sanhita, Mary, and Reshma. Their advice, effort, and suggestions have been really valuable. The whole team has been very professional and helpful.

Stefano Kewan Lee is an IT Consultant with 10 years of experience in system integration, security, and administration. He is a certified Zabbix specialist in Large Environments, holds a Linux administration certification from the LPI, and a GIAC GCFW certification from SANS Institute. When he's not busy breaking websites, he lives in the countryside with two cats and two dogs and practices martial arts.

I would like to thank all my family and friends for their help and support, my co-author Andrea, and most of all, my partner Roberta for putting up with me on a daily basis.

Jan Garaj is a DevOps engineer, who pulls his hair out, when he sees inefficient and expensive server/software solutions. It's because he also wrote some dumb code with terrible exponential O(n2) memory and computational complexity during software engineering study. However, he learned from a few exceptional effective programmers that good algorithms don't need a ton of memory and four core processors. His first touch with Zabbix was in 2009, when he had to choose a monitoring system for his current employer. He chose Zabbix 1.6. Then, he also came across Zabbix in another company with high website traffic environment or on mission critical servers in the automotive sector. He worked also for Hewlett-Packard, so he knows some proprietary HP monitoring tools. But he still prefers Zabbix for open source stack/web monitoring. His Zabbix love lasts to this day, so he is an active Zabbix frontend language maintainer and he may also be a code contributor one day.

Nitish Kumar is a Wintel Lead at HT Media Ltd. and an independent tech blogger about various technologies. He has been working on several Microsoft technologies and open source solutions (including but not limited to Spiceworks, ManageEngine Products, Zabbix, MS Active Directory, MS Exchange Servers, and so on) for the past eight years, of which the last couple of years have been spent on bringing cost-effective solutions to corporates to simplify their complex requirements and to improve time management for their staff. He is a technology enthusiast and has been participating at various corporate events and public webinars. Mobile technologies have been of special interest to him and he has often written about various gadgets and respective tech. Nitish holds an MS degree in Software from JK Institute of Applied Physics and Technology and his areas of interest include Microsoft technologies, open source software, and mobile gadgets.

He occasionally blogs at >.

Huge thanks to my wife Pooja and colleagues for being there, and to my kiddo for enduring through the process of writing the book. Thanks to the Packt Publishing team for their persistence and patienceit surely was hard to work with a chaotic person like me.

K. M. Peterson has worked across traditional boundaries in Information Technology, with a passion for listening and teaching, and a focus on helping those who use technology in an organization work more productively and efficiently. His experience spans over 20 years in all facets of Information Technology, across academic, scientific, and commercial environments. He is a technical manager, with hands-on expertise in infrastructure: computer servers, network technologies, data management, and the disciplines of creating facilities that power reliable and scalable applications. He has built data centers and managed teams of systems administrators, database architects, network engineers, and end user support specialists. Mr. Peterson has mastered technologies from operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac) to security, Storage Area Networks and virtualization to network management and routing.