Goal
I wanted an email alert when my MacBook memory became too low.
The setup used:
- Zabbix Server on AWS Lightsail Ubuntu.
- Docker containers for Zabbix services and PostgreSQL.
- Zabbix Agent on the MacBook.
- Gmail SMTP for notification delivery.
What worked
The main pieces eventually worked:
- Zabbix collected memory data from the MacBook.
- Latest data showed the memory item correctly.
- A trigger could be created for low-memory conditions.
- Gmail delivery worked after SMTP configuration was corrected.
Main failure mode
The most confusing problem was when the Zabbix problem appeared but no email arrived.
The likely causes were operational rather than metric-related:
- the action had no operation configured
- the problem already existed before the action rule was applied
- the media type or recipient was incomplete
- trigger and action conditions did not match
In Zabbix, alerting is not complete just because a trigger fires. Actions, operations, users, media, and conditions all need to line up.
Takeaway
Zabbix is powerful but configuration-heavy. The reliable debugging path is:
- confirm item data
- confirm trigger state
- confirm action match
- confirm operation
- confirm user media
- test delivery
That order makes alert failures much easier to isolate.
