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Visual deck · 10 scenes · 27 animation beats

Zabbix, visually

Monitoring as collect, decide, act: the server, agents and proxy architecture, items that become time series, triggers as opinions, the 3 am flapping trap and hysteresis, escalation ladders, and templates stamped across 200 hosts.

By Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business SchoolUpdated 3 October 2026 About this site

Monitoring tools all do the same three things: collect numbers, decide whether a number is a problem, and act on it. Zabbix names them items, triggers and actions, and this deck draws each one on a single CPU series that crosses a threshold.

The scene most people need is the flapping one: a value that hovers around the threshold fires an alert every minute at 3 am. Hysteresis, a different level to clear than to fire, is the fix, and the deck shows it on the same curve. Templates close the deck: define it once, apply it to the whole fleet.

How to drive it

  • Click or tap anywhere, or press Space or the right arrow: one press is one animation beat, so you can narrate between reveals.
  • Left arrow or right click goes back one beat. Escape leaves the deck.
  • The position is kept in the address bar (#scene.beat), so a link lands on the exact beat you were showing.

The 10 scenes

  1. 1Collect, decide, act
  2. 2Server, agents and proxy: who talks to whom
  3. 3An item is a question asked every N seconds
  4. 4Items become time series
  5. 5A trigger is an opinion about a series
  6. 6The 3 am flapping trap
  7. 7Hysteresis: fire at 90, clear at 80
  8. 8Actions and escalation ladders
  9. 9Templates stamp 200 hosts
  10. 10What to monitor first

Go further

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