I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with Zabbix. It’s a great tool for server status and performance monitoring but can be a real pain to configure.

I’ve used a nagois / cacti combination in the past (which are both also great tools) but grew to prefer Zabbix’s integrated approach. (That is, it monitors both current status and also logs performance stats)

The general rule of thumb with any monitoring tool is that you’ll have to endure a bit of pain now to help you avoid a lot of pain in the future…

The initial install and configuration of Zabbix can be a bit confusing, (I know I found it a hair pulling experience myself…) so here’s a collection of resources which helped me get up and going with Zabbix running on Ubuntu.

1- This guite from HowtoForge is the quickest, easiest way I’ve found to get a zabbix server setup (using apt on ubuntu). However it is pretty specific about using mysql and I’m not sure how flexible the install is in regards to apt installing with another DB

http://www.howtoforge.com/zabbix_network_monitoring_debian_etch

2- From the Zabbix manual itself, the very slow but fairly customisable way in install Zabbix (if you’re in a hurry, start at section 2.4.2). I’ve followed this a couple of times in the past in order to get a Zabbix server working with PostgreSQL

http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/1.8/manual/installation

3- This guide is also useful (especially since it has some screenshots) though I’ve only used it as a means to fill in some of the blanks, I haven’t followed it start to finish.

http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/zabbix.htm

If you get stuck, the Zabbix forum and Stack Overflow are a couple of good places to ask for help. Good Luck!