manual data entry

[ppoetsma]

I have to monitor various parameters in the datacenter. Think about humidity, power, temperatures, etc. Some parameters are collected by SNMP enabled devices, others not. I would like to add manually collected data to Zabbix. So a couple of times per day I measure the external temperature and I want to add that to Zabbix to be able to correlate information.

How should I do this?

Regards,
Paul

[Calimero]

I have to monitor various parameters in the datacenter. Think about humidity, power, temperatures, etc. Some parameters are collected by SNMP enabled devices, others not. I would like to add manually collected data to Zabbix. So a couple of times per day I measure the external temperature and I want to add that to Zabbix to be able to correlate information.

On way of feeding data into zabbix is to use zabbix_sender, a CLI utility that ... sends (surprise!) data given on the command line to zabbix_server.

First step would be to create a new item called "outside.temp" with type "Zabbix Trapper". Type numeric/float.
Create item of the host that already has SNMP temp/moisture/power.

Then from one host with zabbix_sender (you can do it from you zabbix server), run:

/path/to/sbin/zabbix_sender -v -s test_manual -z my.zabbix.server.com -k outside.temp -o 19.2

With:
* 'test_manual' being the hostname as known by zabbix (be careful: case must match as zabbix is case-sensitive when handling data)
* 'my.zabbix.server.com' is the hostname or IP of you zabbix server. If you're running zabbix_sender from your zabbix server you can try 127.0.0.1 (depending on how zabbix_server is configured)
* -k specifies the item key name and -o the value

Of course you can write a small shell script or just set a bash alias (in ~/.bashrc) to shorten it to: "outside.temp <value>"

$ alias
...
alias outside.temp='/usr/local/zabbix/sbin/zabbix_sender -v -s test_manual  -z my.zabbix.server.com -k outside.temp -o '
...
$ outside.temp 14.5
Info from server: "Processed 1 Failed 0 Total 1 Seconds spent 0.016178"
sent: 1; skipped: 0; total: 1

Another option of course is to insert data directy into database but that sounds a bit like overkill for what you want to do.

[ppoetsma]

Wow, as simple as that. I'm new to Zabbix and I had not found the commandline yet. Thanks, the example that you provided is very clear.

Does Zabbix offer other interfaces, for example a PHP library to talk to Zabbix from a PHP script.

Paul

[Calimero]

An API is on the wishlist for 1.8. It may be a webservice.

See this thread: http://zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10660

[ppoetsma]

Thank you.