Community Provided Zabbix Support

Search the internet first

Zabbix has been in development since 2001 and is used by a lot of companies. As such, both the Zabbix Documentation and your favorite search engine provide a wealth of information.

There is a high probability that your question has been asked before, answered and documented.

Nobody likes to repeat themselves, nobody likes to answer the same question over and over.
Please read the the relevant section(s) of the documentation. Please search the internet for your question.
If your question remains unanswered, feel free to ask for support. Don't forget to include what you've found and why it didn't work.

Be explicit, give details

You want something from the community: to help you solve your problem.

The best way to get to that solution, is to make it as easy as possible for us to help you.
If all you tell us is "I have an error" and expecting us to know how to fix that, that is like going to the doctor, say "I have pain" and expect a correct diagnosis.

In order to help you solve your problem, we need relevant details.

We won't do your homework/job for you

We are good at spotting homework (or work assignment) questions; most of us have done them ourselves.
Those questions are for you to work out, so that you will learn from the experience. It is OK to ask for hints, but not for entire solutions.

We get it, most of use didn't like homework either. On the other hand, experience is the only way to gain knowledge and become better at what you do.
A random internet stranger handing you the solution doesn't provide any experience; this adds no real value for you (nor for the community).

Make it as easy as possible for us to help you

We want to help you, really. We want to help you solve your problem.
What is not solving your problem, is to have to ask questions about basic details and waiting for you to answer.

The best way you can help us to help you, is to provide all relevant details up front (including exact error messages, item/trigger configuration, a description of what you are actually trying to accomplish, log entries, …) so we can get to the fun part (actually solving the problem) immediately.

A screenshot is not a question

Just posting a screenshot won't get you any help. We don't consider a screenshot without any explanation to be a question, so we'll most likely just ignore it.

Use screenshots to support your question, to make clear what the issue is or to show how you've configured things, but make sure you add some text with what the issue is and how we can help you (i.e. ask a question).

Also not a question is "I have this problem". If you get an answer at all, it will most likely be something like "Aww, that sucks!", but that's not helpful for you and only mildly amusing for us.

Be polite or be banned

We're here to help, that's what the Zabbix International Community group is all about.

Just keep in mind that we're all volunteering: we provide community support in our own time and we're not getting paid to do so.
As such, we expect you to be polite, something that shouldn't even be said explicitly. If you insult the people whom you expect to help you, think about how large your expected success rate will be.

We can't be more explicit than this: be polite or be banned, there is no middle ground.

We provide support for Zabbix, not Grafana, basic Linux, …

Though most of use do have at least some knowledge of other products, solutions, etc., the scope of the Zabbix International Community Support group is Zabbix. Not Linux, not Grafana, not MySQL.
We do however understand that those components interact with or are fundamental to Zabbix, so we try to be reasonable and flexible.

For example: "I get this error while trying to update the Debian Zabbix packages: $ERROR_MESSAGE" is acceptable. However, if the problem appears to be a general misconfiguration of your Linux itself, be prepared to be told to look elsewhere for a solution to your problem.

"Why isn't Grafana updating $THING from the Zabbix datasource" can or can not be appropriate for the group; please ensure the problem is with Zabbix and not for example a misconfiguration in your Grafana datasource.

Be patient

Community support is provided free of charge, without SLAs. As such, please be patient.
We all have jobs, family, other things to do and are not online 24/7. As such, there is no SLA or even an guarantee we'll reply to your question.

It is perfectly reasonable to bump your question (by replying to it and asking if anyone has any ideas, NOT by copy-pasting it as a new message) if no one reacted after a few hours.
Sometimes the chat is busy and some messages can be overlooked.

If you think you deserve instant replies to your questions, we'll refund your Community Support fee in full will tell you to get paid support.