¶ Zabbix
¶ Operating Systems
Most people learn operating systems by studying commands, kernel components, memory structures, and process tables. They memorize where logs live, how daemons behave, why the scheduler picks one process over another, or what happens when a system boots from firmware to user space. That kind of knowledge is essential, no doubt. But anyone who has managed real systems—servers, virtual machines, containers, or sprawling infrastructure—knows something else too: understanding an operating system is not just about configuration or theory. It’s about observing its behavior over time. It’s about noticing subtle patterns before they become problems. It’s about reading the signals a machine gives off every second of its life. That’s where monitoring becomes more than a technical add-on. It becomes a form of literacy.
This course explores that literacy by pairing the world of operating systems with Zabbix, a monitoring platform that feels nearly purpose-built for people who want to truly understand how systems behave. Over the span of one hundred articles, you will not only deepen your knowledge of OS internals but also learn how Zabbix turns those internal mechanisms into meaningful, actionable insights. You will learn to watch your systems the way an experienced operator does—through data, events, triggers, trends, and intelligent observation.
Operating systems, whether Linux, Windows, or the many UNIX-like variants, speak constantly. They write logs, change resource utilization patterns, spawn and destroy processes, open and close network sockets, adjust memory pages, and launch scheduled tasks. And in environments where uptime matters, or where performance affects customers, every one of these tiny behaviors matters. A single misbehaving process can slowly climb in memory consumption until a server becomes unstable. A storage device can creep toward full capacity without anyone noticing until an application crashes. A service can restart unexpectedly in the early hours of the morning and go uninvestigated for weeks, all while creating intermittent problems that annoy users but refuse to leave obvious traces.
Zabbix brings clarity to these situations, not through abstraction but through visibility. With Zabbix in place, you see the heartbeat of your operating system in real time—CPU curves, memory usage, disk I/O, network traffic, service availability, log messages, and the health of applications that rely on the OS. You start to notice things that would’ve previously gone completely unnoticed. A spike here, a drop there, a slow drift upward in a metric you never thought to check manually. Suddenly, instead of reacting to failures, you start preventing them.
This course is built around the idea that the best way to understand an operating system is to watch it live, not just read about it. Watching an OS through Zabbix feels like watching a city from above—lights turning on and off, traffic patterns forming, bursts of activity at certain hours, quiet periods in between, occasional alarms, and the subtle signs that something somewhere is starting to go wrong. The longer you observe, the more intuitive everything becomes.
Throughout this course, you’ll explore the workings of operating systems not just in theory but in practice. You’ll learn why CPU load behaves the way it does when processes compete for time. You’ll see how disk latency affects applications, how memory pressure forces the kernel to make tough decisions, how services fail silently, and why logs matter as much as they do. Zabbix will help you visualize and understand these phenomena instead of simply reading descriptions of them.
Zabbix itself often gets introduced as a monitoring tool, which is technically correct, but that description undersells it. It is not just a dashboard generator or a graphing platform. It is a full monitoring ecosystem that can collect, store, correlate, alert, visualize, and predict system behavior. When combined with deep OS knowledge, Zabbix becomes something almost pedagogical—a teacher that shows you what your systems are doing at every moment.
In the early articles of this course, you will spend time revisiting foundational operating system concepts: processes, threads, memory management, scheduling, system calls, I/O handling, filesystems, permissions, and networking basics. These concepts become significantly more meaningful when you later watch them reflected in your Zabbix data. For example, understanding the difference between user time and system time makes CPU graphs easier to interpret. Knowing how memory allocation works helps you analyze swap usage trends. Recognizing the behavior of file caching makes disk metrics feel far less mysterious. This course will make all those connections natural.
Once the fundamentals are in place, the focus shifts gradually to Zabbix itself—how it collects data, how agents work, how active and passive checks differ, how items are structured, and how triggers define what normal and abnormal behavior look like. You’ll learn why Zabbix is designed the way it is and how its design aligns with OS architecture. For instance, the fact that Zabbix agents can gather process-level information mirrors the way the OS exposes those details under the hood. The way Zabbix handles low-level discovery beautifully mirrors how the OS dynamically handles resources such as network interfaces, filesystems, and mounted devices.
One of the aims of the course is to help you feel comfortable treating metrics as a language. Every graph Zabbix draws speaks a sentence, and every long-term trend becomes a paragraph in the system’s story. You’ll learn how to read those sentences and paragraphs until you can predict issues with startling accuracy. You’ll learn what normal behavior looks like for different types of servers—database nodes, web servers, application hosts, backend services, file servers, and more. Each system has its own rhythm, and Zabbix helps you learn to recognize it.
In intermediate articles, you’ll dive deeper into techniques that transform Zabbix from a simple monitoring platform into a powerful, proactive system guardian. You’ll explore triggers that detect anomalies, maintenance windows, escalations, custom graphs, templates, distributed monitoring setups, and tuning strategies that help avoid performance overhead. You’ll learn about Zabbix’s flexibility—how it can ingest logs, handle SNMP data, interact with APIs, and even execute remote commands when necessary. You’ll come to appreciate that Zabbix is not just for servers; it can monitor network devices, cloud platforms, containers, and entire enterprise environments.
A significant portion of the course will also focus on real-world OS events and how to observe them through Zabbix. This includes analyzing CPU spikes, investigating memory leaks, tracking runaway processes, detecting filesystem bottlenecks, examining unusual login attempts, monitoring service failures, and identifying abnormal network behavior. You’ll learn to build dashboards that capture these realities at a glance so you can respond faster and more intelligently.
Security plays an important role in this series as well. Operating systems generate security-relevant events constantly: SSH login attempts, failed authentication, privilege escalations, service restarts, unusual network traffic, changes in file permissions, and more. Zabbix, while not a SIEM, is excellent at helping you detect these patterns early. You’ll learn how to configure monitoring that alerts you before a potential compromise becomes an incident.
As the course progresses into its advanced phase, you’ll explore topics like Zabbix proxies, server scaling strategies, database optimization for Zabbix’s backend, clustering, automated deployments, and advanced trigger logic. You’ll learn how to manage large environments where hundreds or thousands of machines feed data into Zabbix every second. You’ll understand what separates a basic monitoring setup from a robust, enterprise-grade monitoring ecosystem.
The final stretch of the course ties everything together. You will examine complete case studies where operating system behaviors and Zabbix insights converge. You’ll see stories of performance degradation diagnosed through long-term trend analysis, mysterious outages traced back to subtle OS signals, and capacity planning done months in advance using historical graphs. You’ll understand how Zabbix fits into a broader operational strategy and why so many professionals rely on it to keep their systems healthy.
The purpose of this introduction is to set the stage for a wide-ranging journey that blends theory with practice. This course doesn’t treat operating systems as abstract entities. It treats them as living, expressive systems that constantly reveal what they’re doing, if only you know how to listen. Zabbix becomes the instrument that amplifies that voice. You’ll finish not only with deeper OS knowledge but with a real sense of how modern monitoring works and why it is indispensable.
You’ll come to appreciate that monitoring isn’t just about collecting numbers or receiving alerts. It’s about understanding behavior—seeing what normal looks like, identifying what abnormal feels like, anticipating change before it arrives, and protecting the stability of the systems you manage. The skills you develop here will stay with you no matter what technology stack you work with. Operating systems will continue to produce signals, and tools like Zabbix will continue to help decode them.
If you’ve ever wanted to reach a point where system behavior feels intuitive, where problems reveal their cause just by looking at a graph, or where you can confidently build monitoring setups that catch issues early and guide operational decisions, this course will take you there. By the end, you’ll be able to see your infrastructure as a dynamic organism instead of a collection of machines. You’ll understand the pulse of your systems and how to keep them healthy. And you’ll know how Zabbix turns that understanding into something practical, powerful, and deeply useful.
This is the beginning of a long but rewarding journey into the heart of operating systems and the world of intelligent monitoring. As you progress through the articles, you’ll develop skills that make you a sharper operator, a better troubleshooter, and a more informed architect. Let’s begin this exploration of systems and signals, guided by the insight and clarity that Zabbix brings to the table.
¶ Zabbix
Part 1: Zabbix Fundamentals & OS Monitoring Basics (20 Chapters)
1. Introduction to Zabbix: Monitoring Your OS Landscape
2. Understanding Operating System Metrics
3. Installing Zabbix: Setting Up Your Monitoring System
4. Zabbix Web Interface: Navigating Your OS Data
5. Adding Your First Host: Monitoring a Basic OS
6. Understanding Zabbix Agents: Collecting OS Data
7. Configuring Zabbix Agents for OS Monitoring
8. Basic OS Monitoring: CPU, Memory, and Disk
9. Monitoring Network Interfaces: Tracking OS Network Activity
10. File System Monitoring: Keeping an Eye on Disk Space
11. Process Monitoring: Tracking Running Processes
12. Log File Monitoring: Watching for OS Errors
13. Event Log Monitoring (Windows): Capturing OS Events
14. Syslog Monitoring (Linux/Unix): Analyzing OS Logs
15. Introduction to Zabbix Templates: Reusable OS Configurations
16. Linking Templates to Hosts: Streamlining OS Monitoring
17. Basic Dashboards: Visualizing OS Performance
18. Creating Simple OS Monitoring Dashboards
19. Alerts: Notifying You of Critical OS Events
20. Configuring Basic OS Alerts: Thresholds and Notifications
Part 2: Intermediate Zabbix & Advanced OS Analysis (25 Chapters)
21. Advanced Zabbix Configuration: Deep Dive into Settings
22. Understanding Zabbix Items: Metrics and Data Collection
23. Item Types: Choosing the Right Collection Method
24. Preprocessing: Transforming OS Data Before Storage
25. Regular Expressions for OS Log Analysis
26. Calculated Items: Deriving New Metrics from OS Data
27. Web Monitoring: Checking OS-Hosted Web Services
28. Database Monitoring: Tracking OS-Related Database Performance
29. JMX Monitoring: Monitoring Java Applications on OS
30. SNMP Monitoring: Gathering OS Data via SNMP
31. IPMI Monitoring: Hardware Health Monitoring of OS Servers
32. Monitoring Virtual Machines: Tracking OS Performance in VMs
33. Docker Container Monitoring: Observing OS Performance in Containers
34. Kubernetes Monitoring: Tracking OS Metrics in Kubernetes Nodes
35. Windows Performance Counters: Advanced OS Monitoring
36. Linux Performance Tools Integration: Extending OS Monitoring
37. Troubleshooting OS Issues with Zabbix Data
38. Correlation of OS Events: Identifying Root Causes
39. Creating Advanced Dashboards for OS Monitoring
40. Using Zabbix's Reporting Features for OS Data
41. Scheduling Reports: Automating OS Insights
42. Understanding Zabbix's Data Model: Organizing OS Data
43. Building Custom Zabbix Templates for OS Monitoring
44. Using Macros for Flexible OS Configurations
45. Value Mapping: Transforming OS Data for Display
Part 3: Advanced Zabbix & OS Deep Dives (30 Chapters)
46. Zabbix API: Programmatic Access to OS Data
47. Automating Zabbix Tasks with the API
48. Integrating Zabbix with Other Monitoring Tools
49. Zabbix Proxies: Distributed OS Monitoring
50. Setting Up Zabbix Proxies for OS Monitoring
51. Data Encryption: Securing OS Data in Transit
52. User Authentication and Authorization: Controlling Access to OS Data
53. Role-Based Access Control for OS Monitoring
54. Zabbix Security Hardening: Protecting Your OS Insights
55. Performance Tuning Zabbix for OS Monitoring
56. Capacity Planning for Zabbix in OS Environments
57. Zabbix Deployment Best Practices for OS Monitoring
58. Monitoring Zabbix's Performance: Keeping an Eye on Your OS Watchdog
59. Using Zabbix for IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) for OS
60. Machine Learning with Zabbix for OS Anomaly Detection
61. Predictive Analytics for OS Performance
62. Using Zabbix for Capacity Planning in OS Environments
63. Integrating Zabbix with Configuration Management Tools
64. Monitoring Cloud OS Environments with Zabbix
65. Serverless OS Monitoring with Zabbix
66. Zabbix for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) for OS
67. Compliance Reporting with Zabbix for OS Data
68. Building a Zabbix Center of Excellence for OS Monitoring
69. Custom Check Development: Extending OS Monitoring
70. Advanced Alerting: Escalations and Notifications
71. Event Correlation: Linking OS Events for Deeper Insights
72. Trend Prediction: Forecasting OS Performance
73. Root Cause Analysis with Zabbix Data
74. Zabbix Performance Tuning: Optimizing for Scale
75. Disaster Recovery Planning for Zabbix in OS Environments
Part 4: Zabbix Expert Topics (25 Chapters)
76. Zabbix Architecture Deep Dive: Understanding the Components
77. Database Schema: How Zabbix Stores OS Data
78. Poller Processes: How Zabbix Collects OS Data
79. Trapper Items: Receiving Data from External Sources
80. Active vs. Passive Checks: Understanding the Difference
81. Zabbix Server Internals: Deep Dive into the Core
82. Zabbix Proxy Internals: How Proxies Work
83. Zabbix Agent Internals: Data Collection Mechanisms
84. Advanced Zabbix API Usage: Complex Integrations
85. Custom Zabbix Module Development: Extending Functionality
86. Performance Tuning Zabbix Database: Optimizing Queries
87. Troubleshooting Zabbix: Common Issues and Solutions
88. Zabbix Upgrade Best Practices
89. Zabbix Security Best Practices
90. Integrating Zabbix with Cloud Platforms
91. Automating Zabbix Deployments with Configuration Management
92. Zabbix Certification: Preparing for the Exam
93. Zabbix Best Practices for OS Monitoring: A Comprehensive Guide
94. Advanced Topics in System Monitoring
95. Monitoring Containerized Applications with Zabbix
96. Monitoring Microservices with Zabbix
97. Zabbix and DevOps: Continuous Monitoring
98. The Future of Zabbix and System Monitoring
99. Building a Scalable Zabbix Infrastructure
100. Advanced Zabbix Administration and Management