Managing IOT systems with Zabbix supervision

The number of connected devices is growing exponentially, according to many sources including Statistica. The average household today has over ten connected devices (compared to only 5 in 2012) and all industries are making more use of smart devices with location-based and M2M technologies. The latest wearable tech provides data and statistics over wireless channels to the consumer smart (phone, watch, glasses) to feed personalized applications and customized targeted advertising content. The Semantic Web (Web3) is streamlining machine-to-machine towards a world where Alexa manages a seamless and pervasive customer experience. 

IOT systems : the needs to be monitored

So given all this technological advancement, why does that new smart TV still decide to do its software upgrade at prime-time, in the fore-ground, leaving you looking at a sand glass for 15 painstaking minutes until its finally done? Why do you still need to talk to some support personnel with a curious accent because the fridge refuses to activate the ice-maker? Why is that smart home thermostat still vulnerable to basic cyber-attacks while patches have been made available six months ago?


The reality is that many of these connected devices need to be monitored. This is true for the connected home as well as for enterprise IOT architectures. However smart the devices are, there is a need to monitor its functioning as well as obtain its statistics. Development for newly launched connected devices and apps is always heavily focused on the service and functionality offered, rather than on manageability and security. Even if a basic monitoring and software upgrade functionality is offered in some basic back-end software, integration with a central monitoring server needs to be performed.

Managing IOT systems with Zabbix

Zabbix offers a proxy-based distributed architecture to allow for management of large environments. Not only does it monitor basic functionality, and provide alerts when some conditions are not satisfied (software too old, backup not successful, component failure, temperature too high, etc), it can be used to monitor SLA levels and trigger automated repair and maintenance activities, ideal for managing IOT systems.

Some of the key operating systems developed for the IOT and Cloud are Snappy Ubuntu Core and Kubernetes/Tectonic. As Zabbix released an agent for Snappy in 2016, is available in container format and is easily integrated with various management protocols such as smart sensors using MODBUS or SNMP protocols, it is a great candidate for managing IOT eco-systems, as zabbix proxies can be used to manage functional sub-domains.

Contact us for more information

Syloé has extensive experience in the development and deployment of complex integrated intelligent Zabbix monitoring solutions for enterprise architectures, taking into account requirements such as High Availability, Encrypted Communications, Distributed Architectures, High NVPS (New Values Per Second), Customized Automation, Integration, Documentation and Customer Education. We would be happy to talk with you about your specific requirements for managing IOT systems.