Getting help

Contents 1 Getting help 1.1 General guidelines 1.2 Wiki 1.3 Forum 1.4 IRC

Getting help

So you need some help or advice regarding Zabbix. Here are the possibilities of receiving one. To ensure you receive quality and timely help, follow some basic guidelines as well.

General guidelines

• Be polite
• Make sure others can understand what you wrote. Avoid abbreviations, usually associated with texting
• Be as specific as possible - if you are asking about some problem, specify Zabbix version. Usually it is also helpful to note database type and version. If asking about some feature, it is useful to explain what you have done to resolve it yourself. If this is related to some specific functionality that relies on 3rd party library, add information about library used and it's version (like //net-snmp-5.4.2.1// or //openipmi-2.0.16//).

Wiki

Look around this wiki and previous Zabbix wiki.

Feel free to register and add your own articles or fix any spotted problems.

Forum

Zabbix forum has a large collection of valuable information and discussions. Feel free to open a new thread if you can't find an already existing one on the topic. Observe some basic guidelines:

• Use English (unless posting in a specific language subsection);
• Choose the correct forum section for your thread;
• If discussing a different problem than the one in the thread, open a new thread. If you have several unrelated questions, do not tuck them all in a single thread - it will be harder for you to receive help that way.

IRC

There is a channel, devoted to Zabbix discussion on the Freenode network - #zabbix. Use one of the many IRC clients to connect. There are some IRC-specific guidelines:

• Do not ask to ask. There is no use to ask something like "can somebody help with something Zabbix related" - that's what the channel is there for. Additionally, this would require somebody to confirm, then you would ask the question, while you could have asked the actual question and received the answer already.
• Allow for some time to pass after asking the question. Do not assume that everybody in the channel is glued to the screen - there are real life duties and there are many different timezones. It might be middle of the night for somebody what is middle of the working day for you. There are also different holidays around the world. Given these circumstances, it is suggested to stay at least 24 hours in the channel after asking the question.
• Do not repeat your question all the time, it will only get people annoyed. Having said that, repeating a question might be appropriate once a day if there have been no responses.