Zabbix agent in sensitive environments

[sirovstrukelj]

Hello,

I am researching into how the Zabbix agent can be configured to not take too many resources in a linux or windows environment. One of the cases of high CPU usage is of course if an item is misconfigured and requries the agent to use up a significant amount of CPU cycles. Are there any ways to make sure that the agent will not use up too many resources?

On Linux I was thinking of just setting the niceness of the agent process to a lower value but could that mean that the agent would not work as reliably? I'd guess on Windows i'd do the same, lower the priority of the process.

[vendrusculo]

Hi!

I've being using the Agent in a few "sensitive" machines and I was never considerate guilty to have it running on that, I mean never seen problems on that servers caused by Zabbix Agent... maybe the "active" agent can be a way to setup it, at least you will not have an port opened in the server.

Leo

[sirovstrukelj]

So far so good. Have not noticed it taking much CPU, I did hear that if you would configure some items incorrectly, they can use some resources. Maybe this can happen with having too many trapper processes running on the agent machine?

[vendrusculo]

yeah... maybe with some user parameters it can happen like check folder or partition size of a NFS mount point.. but at the same time there is a timeout that should "kill" this kind of checking if it takes to much time to return... but I believe the default keys/parameters it should not cause any CPU problem

[ingus.vilnis]

How badly do you have to misconfigure an agent to have a significant usage of CPU that this topic really matters?

The only concern when CPU consumption can become really high is when lots of log files are monitored using very complex regular expression patterns in combination with huge amounts of log lines (1000 lines per second and more). But even then a single core only will be used as only one thread of active agent can be rune against a single Zabbix server.

[sirovstrukelj]

Of course when you're met with new software on a production server, you will be concerned if it starts seeping resources for no reason. Of course I was more leaning towards an example of an agent going haywire than actually limiting it. I guess it all depends on how you configure it.

[ingus.vilnis]

Don't worry too much and overthink this. Zabbix agent will work fine and will use very little resources. Edge cases can happen only as mentioned above when too many complex logs are monitored. But even then it is not a problem on decent servers that we usually have nowadays.