Sometimes big things come in your way in unexpected manner. Happened to me when I was contacted by Sandeep Patil from Packt Publications to take a look over their book over Zabbix. I have seen the book earlier and was already knowing that its one of the biggest book on the subject for sure. Chance of reviewing the same would be like chance of interviewing your favourite star. :)
This would mark my first time, when might have been requested for reviewing some book otherwise, it has happened once for movie, many times for reality shows, many times for websites or services and in recent months a few times for smart phones, but I was never on reviewing some book. I could bet you that even thinking to review a book that too a tech book was harder or may say boring for me, if it would not have been on my sweet heart Zabbix. Zabbix and Squid been my most favourite Open Source applications and these are truly a must for any IT Infrastructure. I have even wrote dummies manuals over them on my blog.
Here is the front cover of the book and if you click over the same, then it would take you to the site itself with the details/ pricing etc of the book. Just taken a sneak peak till now, but I could assure you that its definitely worth taking a look for anyone managing small or big Network Infrastructure.
I have written a couple of posts over Zabbix and deployed it in a few scenario in current job as well as test environment at my home, but definitely that doesn’t stand for a chance to get compared in anyway against the author, Richards Olups, who had straight nine years experience with Zabbix (since first releases). Recently he joined Zabbix SIA and the gained internal knowledge reflects in the book.
This book really fills up the vacuum about Zabbix related books and will really help people, who find it hard enough to deploy confusing NagiOS and then integrating it with other reporting solutions. Even I struggled a lot with countless customizations and template tricks in last many months and always cried if there was a better manual than forums only.
Consisting of 428 pages and 15 chapters, the book not only covers the installation, frontend customizations and extensive configuration instructions, but also includes well worth mentioning chapters over upgrading, maintenance and troubleshooting instructions. The book goes through command-by-command, example-by-example and scenario-by-scenario, not only that but it also includes very useful sources for templates/ rules etc. It really makes the simple yet powerful application experience more wonderful than ever.
As about the structure of the book, then it seems to be really compact and very much to the point (that’s what matter most for any book) along with the same it also impressed me with the way of putting thoughts. Take a look over one example that I got to read, when was just taking a look over introductory lines around backing up Zabbix …
Real men make no backups
And use RAID 0, right? Still, most do make backups, and for a good reason. It is a lucky person who creates backups daily and never needs one, and it is a very unfortunate person who needs a backup when one has not been created, so we will look at the basic requirements for backing up Zabbix.
I’ll take my time to go though the whole of the book and will be back soon with some more thoughts over the book. Meanwhile I want to take this place to thank Sandeep for providing me this licensed electronic review copy to me with personalized footer as given below
Be tuned … will wait for your comments ….
Nitish Kumar 
The book is certainly good !
And as you mentioned, it does have "stuff" that you cannot get from just reading manuals (that's how many of the large books are written nowadays).
You many also want to check out Mikoomi (www.mikooomi.com) - a Zabbix appliance based on Zabbix.
It is based on Zabbix 1.8.1 and has a lot of value-add monitoring agent. And following in the footsteps of Zabbix and Ubuntu - it is completely free to use & download (you don't even need to register!).
--
Jayesh
jayesh.tharkar[at]mikoomi.com