feedback on beta7 and templates

[bbrendon]

Good
First of all, I'm very impressed with beta7. The smaller font is good, the way template items are denoted in hosts is good. The naviagation in the hosts configuration screen is nice. Lots of great stuff!

I then checked out templates. I noticed my template links from before were gone, but i didn't really care because this template thing has never really worked well anyway. I then took a host that I didn't care much about, linked a template to it, and was wowed. It synced/updated the existing items in the host with the template without creating duplicates!

I've played with a few other things and haven't come across any show stoppers. Awesome.

Bad
One thing I don't like is that only one template can be linked to a host. I tried the recursive templates, which appears to work as described, but that doesn't seem to be the answer.

The problem is that say I have templates for all my applications. VPN, Postfix, MySQL, Apache, Coldfusion, etc.

First, do you seriously think I'm going to link all these together if a server does run all these applications? Thats a lot of clicking!

Second, say a server has MYSQL+Apache+Postfix. Okay, now I have one scenerio, thats fine. But say I have Coldfusion+Apache. Now I have to re-create the Apache Items because they are already used in another recursive template sequence? The more application templates I have, the number of permutations for this go up and up!

There must be a better solution...

[Alexei]

One thing I don't like is that only one template can be linked to a host.

...

The problem is that say I have templates for all my applications. VPN, Postfix, MySQL, Apache, Coldfusion, etc.

First, do you seriously think I'm going to link all these together if a server does run all these applications? Thats a lot of clicking!
There must be a better solution...

There was a better solution - previous implementation of the templates. In theory it was perfectly OK. However in practice it appeared to be confusing and some case were very difficult to understand (same item in several templates linked to one host and many other situations).

That's why new templating has been introduced. It is kind of tradeoff between extreme flexibility and ease of use. We leave it as it is at least in ZABBIX 1.1.

I agree that if you have plenty of applications running on one box and you want to define one template-per-application the solution is not quite useful. However for cases when many servers use same software configuration the new templating is a must.

[bbrendon]

There was a better solution - previous implementation of the templates. In theory it was perfectly OK. However in practice it appeared to be confusing and some case were very difficult to understand (same item in several templates linked to one host and many other situations).

Hm. I wasn't convinced the prior templating worked 100%. I would edit templates and end up having duplicate items and triggers in my hosts. It was very frustrating.

Sticking with the current system, it doesn't seem that it should be too hard to have multiple templates applied to one host. Couldn't we just have a dropdown like the dependency dropdown with an add button for additional templates for the host?

The only downside i see to this is that displaying template information in the host list would be a little different than it currently is in beta7. The trigger and item configuration screens can display the template name that brings the item/trigger to the host the same as it currently does in beta7.

[edeus]

At the very least, cant we have the ability to link a template to more than one other template?

I posted another topic asking why it has been done this way, thought I could link templates together then bridge them to one host. But this doesnt work as I just recently found out?

I just dont understand the point of having templates if you can only link to one host? I must be missing something major here because it goes against my best logic (which can be sketchy at the best of times :)).