Zabbix agent, UserParameter, and including?

[mikecrowe]

Hi folks,

One thing I hate is manually editing all my UserParameter settings on each monitored system.

I'd love to see 2 things:

1. Ability to "include" a separate .conf script with UserParameter entries (so a corporate set of parameters can be distributed)
2. Ability of the agent to parse this live, so we don't have to restart the agent.

Does anybody else agree?

[jcollie]

Configuration Management

Use a configuration management system like Puppet or Bcfg2 to manage the Zabbix configuration files (both of which include the ability to use templates) and restart the agent service as needed.

http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/

http://www.bcfg2.com/

For example, here is the template that generates my zabbix_agentd.conf:

Server=127.0.0.1,10.0.0.1
Hostname=$metadata.hostname
ListenPort=10050
StartAgents=5
DebugLevel=3
PidFile=/var/run/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.pid
LogFile=/var/log/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.log
Timeout=3
DisableActive=1
EnableRemoteCommands=1

{% if metadata.hostname in [ 'anfwext01.dmacc.net', 'anfwext02.dmacc.net' ] %}\
UserParameter=tcstat[*],/root/bin/tcstat $1 $2
{% end %}\
{% if 'mysql-server' in metadata.groups %}\
UserParameter=mysql.ping,/usr/bin/mysqladmin --user=monitor ping|grep alive|wc -l
UserParameter=mysql.uptime,/usr/local/bin/mysql-stats-inquirer status.uptime
UserParameter=mysql.threads,/usr/local/bin/mysql-stats-inquirer status.threads
UserParameter=mysql.questions,/usr/local/bin/mysql-stats-inquirer status.questions
UserParameter=mysql.slowqueries,/usr/local/bin/mysql-stats-inquirer status.slow_queries
UserParameter=mysql.qps,/usr/local/bin/mysql-stats-inquirer status.queries_per_second
UserParameter=mysql.version,mysql -V
{% end %}\
{% if 'asterisk-server' in metadata.groups %}\
UserParameter=asterisk[*],/usr/local/bin/asterisk-stats-inquirer $$1
{% end %}

In this case I'm using the Genshi templating system:

http://genshi.edgewall.org/

[mikecrowe]

Funny you should mention that: I was just reading up on puppet last night.

However, my point was that the agent really has 2 different types of config: server/process info which don't change, and userparameters which may be expanded as your monitoring develops.

I've had problems when doing /etc/init.d/zabbix-agent restart. It almost needs a pause to sample until the existing processes are going before restarting. I almost always do a stop, a lot of ps | grep zabbix, and start commands.

[jcollie]

Configuration Management

I've had problems when doing /etc/init.d/zabbix-agent restart. It almost needs a pause to sample until the existing processes are going before restarting. I almost always do a stop, a lot of ps | grep zabbix, and start commands.

That sounds like a bug in the init script... it should be a relatively easy matter to update the init script so that it waits for all existing zabbix_agent processes to disappear before starting up the new ones.

If you don't feel like updating the init script you should be able to accomplish what you want with Puppet's "file" and "exec" types - I use Puppet to manage a different set of servers running Zabbix.