Zabbix + Host Configuration [Newbie]

[rauldinho]

Hi, i'm new to Zabbix. I'm testing it because where i work we want to migrate from Nagios to another monitoring application. I installed Zabbix in a computer and all went smoothly. My problem comes when i try to configure a Host. Let's say for example i want to check with a PING if my host with IP 19.168.1.1 is alive. How do i do this? I succesfully created the new host but i don't know how to make the test i want work. Like i say i'm new in Zabbix and i'm reading all i find that can help me, but if anyone could make this faster by giving me some help i would deeply appreciate it. Thanks for any answer i may get!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, i'm trying to do this without installing tha agent in the host i'm monitoring!

[just2blue4u]

Hi!

I'm happy to hear you decided to use Zabbix! If you once realized how to handle it, you'll never want something other!

Without a Zabbix agent on that host you must use SNMP or "simple checks".
Go to "configuration" -> "hosts" (URL=/zabbix/hosts.php) and click [create Host].
- Give it a name (doesn't need to be the DNS name)
- Enter DNS and/or IP and tell Zabbix which to use for communication with the Client
- Everything other should work by default here
Now Zabbix knows about your Client host.

Next, go to "configuration" -> "items" (URL=/zabbix/items.php), make sure your created host is marked in the dropdown "Host" and click [Create Item]
- Description is used as the item's name e.g. if you watch graphs later.
- Type should be "simple check" (later you can try some SNMP checks)
- click [Select] in the "Key"-row and mark "Simple Check" in the "type" dropdown
- "icmpping" is boring, use "icmppingsec"
- "unit" is "s" or "sec" or whatever you want to be displayed
- All other default parameters may be left default (later you should keep an eye on your "update interval" "keep history" "keep trends" parameters because the size of your needed DB space is directly depending on this values)
- click [save]

Now go to "Monitoring" -> "latest data" (URL=zabbix/latest.php) and select your host.
there should be your item displayed. in the right row, select "graph", and wait for the page to be refreshed (or do it yourself) so you can see your Ping statistics get another value every 30s.

Hope this helps for the start!
Ich really recommend reading the manual. Yes, it's big, but so is zabbix.
Feel free to experiment with zabbix, but don't think you get around the Docs... :P