Are zabbix official templates suitable for real use?

[varnav]

Hello!

We have an argument on the net with one of the colleagues. She says that templates, which are shipped with Zabbix, are just an examples, and not meant for real use.
But my point is that these templates are intended for real use, that's the idea behind them. Of course, some of them may be imperfect, and some may need some tuning because there is no one-size-fits-all. But still - these are for use, not for learning.

What do you think about this?

P.S.

Sorry for typo in the poll question, 'and' should be read as 'an'. Can moderators fix this?

[kloczek]

"Real use" term does not automatically defines the same list of metrics, alarms and all things on presentation layer.
Yes, many people are using standard templates only because in exact monitring conditions "good enough".
Longer someone is using zabbix than higher probability that it would be necessary to monitor/alarm something which is not present in default templates.

Ergo: it is not possible preciselly answer on your question as your questions are using not precisely definded facts.

[Deslok]

I think it depends on your real use scenario, for monitoring simple things they're perfect, I have 15 media players that they monitor far more than i'd ever need(but they keep track of reboots and when they go offline, the load metrics are interesting when trying new things but not typically useful otherwise) and couldn't need anything beyond that, I haven't been to get one to fit my switches properly unfortuantly

[nick0909]

I don't think they do well at either honestly.

They aren't good examples because they don't show some of the more advanced triggers you could be using, so people just assume the simple triggers are all you can do.

The default options in my opinion poll too often and store too much data for anything bigger than a handful of machines, and also can be outdated with the items they check.

But that is my applying it to my use case, they might be perfect for other people.

[ysus]

Page 28 of "Zabbix Performance Tuning" book by Luciano Alves says:

The default templates shouldn't be used in a production environment:
It happens that default templates are the only examples that show you how to use item keys, triggers, graphs, LLD, macros, and other Zabbix features and functions. Such templates usually have gathering intervals shorter than what you really need.


Hope we could rely on his vast experience...

[varnav]

Hmm, anyone can tell me the exact reason not to use default templates for Linux, Windows and VMWare? They seem to be working fine, especially with some (not much) tuning.

[Jason]

Everyone has different requirements for monitoring and wants to monitor different things for different reasons. The default templates are a good starting point, but they almost certainly won't have everything you want and will also have some things in them that you don't need to monitor. The frequency of items in there may be too high or low for your use...

If you're going to monitor a large amount of systems it's worth investing the time to write your own templates that fine tune things for your applications.

[varnav]

Usually everyone wants no monitor CPU, RAM and disks, and this is what default templates offer.

Are there any templates available to monitor Windows, Linux and VMWare that I can download and that are better than default templates?