Open-Future

The UZA is a university center for top clinical and customer-friendly patient care, high-quality academic training and ground-breaking scientific research with an important international dimension. The UZA has 593 recognized hospital beds on 26 nursing units. Every year, approximately 30,000 patients spend the night here and approximately 50,000 patients stay in our day hospital. There are 41 highly specialized medical services where more than 800,000 patients are consulted every year. About 4,000 employees work at the UZA, including 642 doctors.

https://www.uza.be

Zabbix has proven itself as a powerful and versatile monitoring and management platform that allows us to gain real-time insight into the performance of our IT infrastructure and applications. With the ability to collect and visualize various types of data.

• Including network traffic
• Server load
• Application performance
• and more …

Zabbix allows us to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact operations or patient care. At this moment we monitor about 1400 hosts. This is a mix of Windows, Linux and baremetal monitored by proxies. This allows us to monitor more then 10.000 metrics with more then 55.000 triggers to notify us in case of any potential issues. We make use of custom templates, plugins and scripts to gather all needed information. The impact of Zabbix on our operational efficiency cannot be underestimated.

• Through automated alerts and reporting functionality, we can respond quickly to incidents and issues.
• Reducing downtime and maximizing the availability of critical systems.
• This has direct benefits for our patients, as we can ensure that vital systems such as electronic medical records are always available and that the quality of care we provide is maintained at the highest level.

The setup

In our case the Zabbix server was setup as a Virtual Machine with a seperate frontend from Zabbix server and database. This because during the day many users will connect to the frontend. Splitting the frontend from the Zabbix server allowed us to use dedicated resources for frontend and Zabbix server.

Most of the monitoring is by Zabbix agents on Linux and Windows. For the applications to see if everything is working as it should, we rely on a mix of custom scripts by makeing user of the UserParameters and database monitoring with Agent 2. For some more specific monitoring cases we also make use of custom sql scripts.

The challenge:

One server can have multiple teams being responsible for just the application or the OS, so sending the correct information to the right team can be difficult sometimes. A simple solution would be to create different Trigger Actions for every team and include only the triggers that are needed. This becomes very difficult to manage over time and is very error prone when you need to make changes.

The Solution:

We made exensive use of TAGS in Zabbix. By adding labels to the items and linking it back to the correct user groups. This made it more easy to send the right information to the correct teams and allowed us to simplify the actions and reduce the number of actions that we had to create a lot.

Open-Future is our premium Zabbix partner who installed the monitoring system, upgrades and maintains it.