zabbix

Active Backup for Business

We use Synology Active Backup for business as a backup solution for our Hyper-v hypervisors.

It works really well, but Synology hasn’t exposed any way to monitor it from SNMP or anything else.

I have seen many people asking how to monitor it, and the best solution I have seen requires connecting to the NAS unit using SSH, as root and running a script to read the ABB sqlite database.

I noticed that in ABB there is a configuration option to ship logs to a syslog server, which is easily monitored using Zabbix.

The log forwarding configuration in Active Backup for Business

Using a syslog-ng server in docker container, I set up everything to receive the logs:

---
version: "3.7"
services:
  syslog-ng:
    image: linuxserver/syslog-ng
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=4
      - TZ=Europe/Brussels
    volumes:
      - /srv/syslog-ng/config:/config
      - /srv/syslog-ng/log:/var/log
    ports:
      - 514:5514/udp
      - 601:6601/tcp
      - 6514:6514/tcp

The syslog-ng configuration file is very simple and to the point:

#############################################################################
# Default syslog-ng.conf file which collects all local logs into a
# single file called /var/log/messages tailored to container usage.

@version: 3.35
@include "scl.conf"

source s_local {
  internal();
};

source s_network_tcp {
  syslog(transport(tcp) port(6601));
};

source s_network_udp {
  syslog(transport(udp) port(5514));
};

destination d_local {
  file("/var/log/messages" perm(0640));
  file("/var/log/messages-kv.log" template("$ISODATE $HOST $(format-welf --scope all-nv-pairs)\n") frac-digits(3) perm(0640));
};

log {
  source(s_local);
  source(s_network_tcp);
  source(s_network_udp);
  destination(d_local);
};#

The log arrive in real time:

Snapshot Replication

In the Snapshot replication app, there is not option to configure log shipping.

However, in the background, the apps uses the same mechanism as ABB for log management: an instance of syslog-ng on the Synology NAS.
The logs end up in: /var/log/synolog/synodr.log (it seems that snapshot replication is called Disaster Recovery internally at Synolog)

We just need to push a configuration file to in the syslog-ng patterndb.d folder (/etc/syslog-ng/patterndb.d/snapreplication.conf) with the appropriate permissions (owner “system”, group “log”, mode 644) which contains this: (replace {{ HOSTNAME }} with the hostname of your syslog-ng destination server)

@version: 3.34

source snapshot_replication {
    file("/var/log/synolog/synodr.log");
};
destination docker {
        network(
                "{{ HOSTNAME }}"
                port(514)
                transport(udp)
                ip-protocol(4)

                log_fifo_size(50000)
                keep_alive(no)
        );
};

log {
    source(snapshot_replication); destination(docker);
};

You juste need to restart the syslog-ng server on the NAS and you’re good to go:

systemctl restart syslog-ng

Logs will then start to appear in the syslog-ng docker container:

You can use the templates here to monitor the logfile using Zabbix.

It uses Zabbix Active check so you need to make sure that is set up correctly.