Today was a good day for science since I managed to put together two of my favourite tools in a Proof of Concept. The purpose of the setup was to monitor a blockchain implemented with Multichain from Zabbix monitoring system.
“The” Blockchain
Blockchain is a popular topic today, particularly because it is the technology behind Bitcoin, the most popular crypto coin on the market. However, cryptocurrencies are just one of the applications of the blockchain, the scope of technology being way broader. To put it simply, a blockchain is a distributed ledger between multiple parties which do not necessary trust each other. Every transaction between them is recorded in the chain as blocks which are distributed among all parties involved. Thus all of the participants in the blockchain have exactly same copies of a chain of data blocks, which is continuously growing. The purpose of the PoC was exactly the monitoring of this chain.
Setup
The setup for the PoC was pretty simple and it involved the following components:
- Zabbix Monitoring System, running Zabbix 3.4
- Blockchain network, consisting of 3 nodes running Multichain 1.0 beta-2
All components were deployed on an Openstack cloud and easily configured using Bluedrive Ansible Playbooks Pack.
Once the setup was in place, it is easy to create the blockchain and start creating transactions following the awesome guide from Multichain.
Zabbix Monitoring
Implementing the monitoring on the Zabbix side involved some custom scripting leveraging multichain-cli tool for reading parameters from the chain. The script was integrated with a Zabbix Agent installed on a blockchain node through UserParameters.
Once data was available through Zabbix Agent, it was easy to create a Mulichain template and process data in Zabbix server. You can see bellow some graphics created in a board from the NMS system.
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