Managing a large user/admin base, and large amount of templates?

[toddblake]

Last year I moved into a new job and that job was being a Zabbix admin for a large installation. After upgrading them from 1.8 to 2.2, and setting up clustering, the next hurdle to tackle is what we've dubbed "template sprawl".

Prior to my inheritance of it, Zabbix had no official owner. There were many folks with their fingers in it, and now I have to reel it all back in.

The users are well educated in Zabbix and can manage their own hosts, templates, etc, but we also don't want a ton of duplicated templates and effort. We also don't want folks stepping on eachothers toes.

What I have is a large community of users, dozens of support groups within our organization. It's easy enough to drop hosts into host groups, users into user groups, and seperate along those lines. But when it comes to templates, I'm curious what others are doing.

We can of course make some educated decisions and go out on our own, but I'm curious how others handle situations like this?

[acropia]

My habit is to create small templates dedicated to very specific tasks/services, and then nest these 'resource' template into 'role' templates. The role templates can be prefixed for different departments/clusters.

That way works for out setup very well, because of the grouping in role templates. But, it would be really great is Zabbix would offer some built-in hierarchy in templates, so views and permissions could be more specific.

Example of our template hierarchy:
= Role Webserver 2012 Shared (consists of resource templates)
== App Windows DNS (only DNS specific items/triggers)
== App Windows Active Directory (only AD stuff)
== App Windows IIS (web specific items)
== Hardware Disks (disk failure, capacity, etc)
== Hardware Nics (nic i/o)
== Hardware Memory (free, size, etc)
== OS Windows (general Windows items, only OS items)
=== OS Windows 2012 (WS2012 specific items)

[BDiE8VNy]

I'm a big advocate of keeping things non-redundant and I make heavy use of inheritance as well.

But when it comes to multiple teams having different permission in Zabbix I avoid shared parent templates at all due to ZBX-8018.
For now I maintain common usable templates separately and clone them for a team on demand.

There may be several templates linked to the same host which are maintained by users with different permission. But all parent templates of such a directly linked template belong always to the same host groups.

It's probably not the be-all and end-all of doing it. So I'm quite eager as well to read how others manage templates with many different teams.