Zabbix Distributed Monitoring questions

[mschlegel]

I'm working on setting up a distributed monitoring system with zabbix to assist in planning out scaling for our system as a whole. I'm finding the following is making it difficult to work with the distributed monitoring environment.

1: It does not appear to be possible to move hosts between nodes. This would make it difficult to utilize distributed monitoring to provide any type of load balancing mechanism.

2: Related to 1, it also looks like it is not possible to copy other configuration information between nodes. It would be useful, for example, to select specific groups and templates to copy between nodes. Ideal would be a way of configuring a template to stay synchronized between nodes.

Currently running on Zabbix 1.6

I'll expand this list as I find any additional issues.

Thank you for the assistance.

[xs-]

The naming wasn't chosen that well i guess, you are not the first to ask these kind of questions.

I think you want to look at the use of proxies.

DM (Distributed monitoring) is set up to have multiple standalone zabbix servers which have where one parent can have multiple childs. The parent holds all configuration and monitoring data from the childs, and childs accept configuration changes from a parent.
This is especially useful when you have multiple departments all doing their own management / monitoring but you have a parent/child relation between these depts. Or if you have multiple, completely different, environments which have different requirements and needs (seperate child zabbix servers) but you want to manage them centrally (one parent).

If you have a large environment where you wish to split the agent load, you can use multiple proxies using one zabbix server where you can manage all.

[mschlegel]

Proxies provide a piece of the load balancing picture, but it isn't the entire answer. Since nodes can be configured to only send event data to their master server, nodes could be used to split up the data processing and storage load that seems to build up fairly rapidly. Since there is a central management interface for a distributed monitoring environment, it seems that it should be a fairly basic conceptual extension to be able to move or copy hosts between nodes.

We are also building this system to handle monitoring of remote sites. These remote sites would be monitoring the same sorts of things that the local site monitors. Since local event notifications are desired, proxies would not provide the required functionality. In this environment, it would be helpful to be able to at least manually copy template information between nodes. Ideal would be to have a mechanism where a template can be marked to be synchronized between nodes and have any changes automatically copied to the remote configurations.

I did find the export / import options that can be used to copy configuration between servers, but that seems very cumbersome to me.

While it appears the conceptual view of 'distributed monitoring' seems to be simply a collection of standalone servers, there is potential for significantly more interesting functionality.