Active Client Auto Registration [Zabbix]

- Active Client Auto Registration
Discussion

Active Client Auto Registration

Completely new in Zabbix 1.8, it is possible to allow active Zabbix agent auto-registration, after which server can start monitoring them. This allows to add new hosts for monitoring without any manual server configuration for each individual host.

The feature might be very handy for automatic monitoring of new Cloud nodes. As soon as you have a new node in the Cloud Zabbix will automatically start collection of performance and availability data of the host.

Setting up the Action

The Zabbix manual page about actions gives a more full description of actions and how they work.

The first step is to set up an action to allow agent auto-registration. Go to the Configuration → Actions section in the Zabbix menu and select Auto registration from the pull down Event source list.

Click the Create Action button. You need to enter the following details into the event tabs:

Action

Give your action a name (e.g. Auto Registration Linux Systems for registration of Linux systems).

Conditions

None should be required here. Question: Should there be different conditions for registering different types of agent?

Operations

Add the following Operations to this tab:

Add host
Add to host groups: You probably want to define a special group for auto-registered hosts, or perhaps use the Discovered hosts group. Also add to a group like Linux Servers.
Link to templates: You probably want to add the host to a template such as Template_Linux.

If the hosts that you are auto-registering are likely to be supported for active monitoring only (such as hosts that are firewalled from your Zabbix server) then create a template like Template_Linux-active as described on the Active Host configuration page.

Agent Configuration

Ensure that you have the Zabbix server identified in your zabbix_agentd.conf file, e.g:

Server=10.0.0.1

If you don't define a Hostname in your zabbix_agentd.conf file then it will use the system hostname. On Linux this can be obtained by looking at the output of the hostname command.

Network discovery

You don't need to do network discovery to have agents auto-register as of Zabbix version 1.8. You can combined the two if you like but they are not dependent on each other.