Guides
Field notes for the person who owns the monitor
Step-by-step write-ups of jobs we have done more than once: configuring devices, sizing hardware, taming alerts and moving between tools. Commands are included where they help.
Covers Zabbix · September 29, 2026
Cutting alert noise: thresholds, dependencies and flapping
How to stop a monitoring system from paging for nothing: trigger hysteresis, dependencies, maintenance windows and flap detection in Zabbix, Icinga and Checkmk.
Covers Zabbix · September 29, 2026
How big should your monitoring server be?
Sizing a Zabbix (or similar) monitoring server from first principles: items, NVPS, history vs trends, housekeeping, partitioning and proxies, with a worked example.
Covers Icinga · September 29, 2026
Moving off Nagios Core: a migration plan that doesn't lose checks
Inventory, parallel run, plugin reuse and cutover: a step-by-step plan for replacing Nagios Core with Icinga 2 or another monitor without silent gaps.
Covers LibreNMS · September 29, 2026
Setting up SNMPv3 on switches and routers for monitoring
A practical SNMPv3 authPriv setup for Cisco IOS and Linux net-snmp, with snmpwalk tests, the errors you will actually see, and how to add devices to LibreNMS.