Zabbix for monitoring 5000 OpenWrt router/access points - advice needed

[adamyaqub]

We have a project providing Internet via wifi hotspots running on mainly consumer routers & access points - all with OpenWrt firmware for 1000s of refugee camp residents. We are looking for an open source solution for monitoring the uptime & 'WAN' bandwidth of the access points. The current number is around 5000 units.

As the metrics required are very limited - i.e. just uptime & overall Internet use/bandwidth - would one 16GB RAM/i5 or i7 CPU server be sufficient for Zabbix? Also - what would be the best method for monitoring - SNMP, Zabbix Agent Passive, Zabbix Agent Active? Any other advice for our intended use? - Thanks.

[cyber]

Never touched a openwrt device myself, but as it sees there is agent available for it... https://openwrt.org/packages/index/a...ation---zabbix
If you are in control of all devices and their configs, then agent could probably provide this info. Using active agents leaves all gathering of data to agent and you just need to accept the data they send. So you don't need to poll, which takes a lot of resources. Anything that needs polling will increase your need of hardware (proxies). That box should be ok for trigger calculations... But you need to have pretty fast disks....

[santiagobiali]

Currently I have 11 Openwrt routers under zabbix's monitoring. All of them are running Zabbix Agent 5.0.18, which is included in our custom-compiled image, but it can be installed.

The templates I'm using are: "Linux by Zabbix Agent" and "Template Openwrt wifi".

As you have thousands of devices, I suggest you to use "HOSTMETADATA" to auto-register your devices.

[fmardones]

Hi, what version of zabbix server do you have installed for the 5.0.18 agent?

[troffasky]

You should check out OpenWISP. It does have its own monitoring metrics but you can use it to push out Zabbix agent config files, for example.

[cris458carlo]

Hello,
Monitoring 5000 OpenWrt routers and access points with Zabbix is a significant task, but it’s definitely achievable with the right setup.
Use Zabbix Agent Active: Given the scale of your deployment, using Zabbix Agent Active is likely the best option. It offloads the data collection to the agents, reducing the load on the server.
Auto-Registration: Utilize Zabbix’s auto-registration feature to manage the large number of devices efficiently. This can simplify the process of adding new devices to the monitoring system.
Proxies: Consider using Zabbix proxies to distribute the load and improve performance. Proxies can collect data from a subset of devices and then forward it to the main server.
Templates: Use and customize templates for OpenWrt devices to streamline the monitoring setup.
Database Optimization: Ensure your database is optimized for performance, as it will be handling a significant amount of data.
Regular Maintenance: Perform regular maintenance and monitoring of your Zabbix server to ensure it continues to perform well as the number of monitored devices grows.
Hope that helps.