Why Not have SNMP for monitoring , instead of Zabbix clients

[bisana]

Hi
Some of my thoughts , why need to have a Zabbix client for monitoring , hope the zabbix development team , will come out with fully SNMP monitored Zabbix in the coming versions
For me SNMP , means I do not need to install on the monitored server any client software , Looking forward for a zabbix with no clients software/demons on the monitored servers
Thanks
Joseph John

[Neo]

You do not have to have the clients installed on the server you are monitoring. It is possible to monitor servers without having the clients installed on them.
I think this is mentioned somewhere in the manual.

[mconigliaro]

zabbix already has agent-less snmp support.

[safl]

As the other guys mentioned it is not nescesarry to install the agent to monitor a host. Zabbix supports a wide variety of methods to do it's job.
Let me give you a run down:

* ZABBIX agent
* ZABBIX agent (active)
* Simple check
* SNMPv1 agent
* SNMPv2 agent
* SNMPv2 agent
* Zabbix Trapper
* Zabbix Internal

The zabbix agent is the piece of software you install on the host you wish to monitor, you can run polling checks (zabbix agent) or get checks pushed to youre monitoring host with zabbix agent (active).
The active agent is my preferred choice for monitoring windows hosts, since i do no have to open any ports in firewalls or install and tweak the very very very crappy snmp support in windows. All i do is roll-out the agent and boom i got access to all performance counters, hardware i/o, service checks etc. etc...
and very soon we will also have access to NT Eventlog.

Simple checks are for monitoring services like, http, ftp smtp etc.. etc.. really usefull for checking internet services.

There's not much to say about SNMP, you compile zabbix with snmp support and voila you are ready to go! SNMP is probably preferred to monitor routers/firewalls. Version 1, 2, 3 is supported in alpha11.

Zabbix trapper lets you send data to the monitoring host, there is a small binary called zabbix_sender you can use this to do your'e own checks and send the data off to zabbix. Really usefull for sending the status of your backup in cron-script or stuff like that.

Zabbix Internal is for monitoring internal parameters of the monitoring host.

You can use the method that is most suited for the parameters you wish to monitor and your network setup.

Read more here:
http://www.zabbix.com/manual/v1.1/config_items.php

Even though' the documentation is outdated it does give you an idea of what great possibilities you have with zabbix.

Compare this with nagios and you will be amazed!

regards,
Simon

[bisana]

Hi
It is good that Zabbix have different methods to check the parameters , first I started using snmp , then I had to move on to zabbix_agentd I want to describe how I faced problems
1>At first I decided that I will use SNMPv1 , for monitoring all the parameters , started configuring for SNMP , everything worked , but the most important of observing CPU parameters were not giving correct results , checked the mailing list and archive , got info that
2>I decided to try with zabbix_agentd, now when I enter this field in the host detail , I was not getting the result , because the host was defined by port 161 for SNMP , now I made another entry for all the host , with another name starting with “Z -host” , so now I have two entry for each host
Now when monitoring through zabbix_agentd , I was not getting correct result for Free disk space on “/” “/home” , it always shows 1.33 MB for both the values , the key which I had given is “diskfree[/home]” , diskfree[/], the other parameter which i monitor I am getting the results
Without getting this parameter correctly I cannot setup the trigger
I am looking forward when we can rely on one single way of monitoring , ( SNMP or Zabbix) for all the needs
Thanks
Joseph John