A backup plan is only as good as your ability to keep an eye on it — because when the lights go out, you don’t want to be crossing your fingers and hoping the generator does its job.
Hindsight is a beautiful thing. It lets you look back on events and think critically: What could I have done differently? Why didn’t I consider that from the start? How do we improve next time?
But in the monitoring space, hindsight isn’t good enough. We don’t want to be looking back after the fact — we want to capture issues at the beginning, so we can act on them in real time.
Redundancy is an integral part of any operation. So, when one of our customers asked us to add another layer to their redundancy plan, the ICT Networks DevOps Team saw an excellent opportunity to customise a Zabbix solution.
The challenge: monitor a power generator on the roof of a building, designed to kick in during a power outage. The question was simple but critical: How do you know your insurance plan is ready when you need it? Yes, you can run periodic tests — but is there another way? Could we customise an open-source tool to track key metrics from an industrial generator that doesn’t support standard monitoring protocols?
Enter the Zabbix HTTP agent. It provides a simple but powerful way to scrape data directly from a website — in this case, the generator’s clunky old status page.
By combining JSONPath preprocessing with value mapping and triggers, we built a real-time monitoring and alerting setup — without writing a single external script.
The result? The customer now has added confidence that their organisation can keep services running, even in the face of unexpected events. And by leveraging open-source software, they’ve strengthened resilience without adding cost.
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Zabbix Metrics Collection Features
Blog Written by:
Mark Maloney, CEO ICT Networks
Tim Dykes, CTO ICT Networks
September 2025
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