Monitor Regular/Security Updates on Ubuntu Using APT in Zabbix

Introduction

What is zabbix ? Zabbix this is a free and open source network monitoring tool which is used to monitor availability and performance of your infrastructure: servers, network devices and rest assets.

Zabbix:: The Enterprise-Class Open Source Network Monitoring Solution

In this article I would like to show how to monitor available updates using Zabbix on Ubuntu Servers.

Requirements

Root access is required when we updating APT repositories, zabbix is run under a dedicated user, so we can do it on two ways:

• Using sudo in agent configuration
• Using a crontab to invoke apt-get update periodically or use APT::Periodic functionality bundled inside the APT system itself

In this case we are use APT::Periodic 😊 because APT::Periodic is executed via already existing APT maintenance script which are located cron.daily.

Installation

• Clone source https://github.com/theranger/zabbix-apt.git
• Copy APT configuration from apt.conf.d/02periodic to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d
• Copy Zabbix agent configuration from zabbix_agentd.d/apt.conf to /etc/zabbix/zabbix-agent.d/apt.conf
• Import templates/apt-updates.xml to Zabbix frontend.

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial was helpful and with its help you will be able to better monitor the amount of updates we should install on our servers.

Thanks for reading!