Slow statistics collector - UserParameters or zabbix_sender?

[kees]

I'm using zabbix to monitor several linux servers and other devices. However, i have a few questions about items, keys etc.

To monitor a Dell MD3000i i have to use a JVM with a Java cli from Dell. I can get statistics from it, and have them displayed in my console. However, to have it run once, spit out the statistics and stop takes around 30 seconds-1 minute.

I want to get roughly 20 items from this box to monitor (in/out traffic on the 4 interfaces, read/write io on the disks etc). I believe i can do this with a UserParameter for each key. However, if i understand zabbix correctly, as soon as the server queries those UserParameters it will run the java cli, get that 1 particular key, returns it and closes the cli. As this takes 30 seconds in a best case scenario, i think i can expect to have a minimum of 10 cli's running at any time (with a check every 60 seconds).

That isn't acceptable. For one it is kinda silly to have to run this cli 20 times to get all the data, select 1 key from it, return that key, run it again; get the same data and return another key.

So what is the best practice for a situation like this? Have 20-odd UserParameters running the same slow and resourcehugging application everytime does not sound like a good practice.

So is there a way to have 1 UserParameter return multiple keys? So i can run the script once, and return all 20 keys at the same time.

Or should i make a script that uses a zabbix_sender to send the keys whenever it is called from a UserParameter (i don't want to use a crontab for it if possible, so i can let the zabbix server query the data when it wants it)

And can i use zabbx_sender to send multiple keys at once? (i want to limit the amount of processes i have to start/stop for the data collection as much as possible - so a 'grep item cachefile|tr|cut|uniq|sort|uniq' construction launching multiple programs is not what i want - nor do i want a script that starts a zabbix_sender more than once to send data to the server if possible)

Anyway, my preference would be a UserParameter that can return multiple keys at once, but if that isnt possible i'd have to write a script that uses one instance of zabbix_sender; and if that fails, i guess i have to write my own function to send data to the zabbix server so i can call it from my own script.

[kees]

As there are not many response, i went forward and made myself a script.

Based on:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8847

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showpost.php?p=19825&postcount=2

http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/doku.php?id=howto:dellipmi

First; i wanted to do it in php, as most of our codebase is in php (and i think perl looks ugly )

Anyway, this is what i came up with. A way to collect and send multiple keys at once to the server:

zabbix_sender.inc:

<?	
	define("SERVER", "10.0.1.24");
	define("PORT", "10051");

	/**
	 * function zabbix_sender - send data to the zabbix server
	 *
	 * @param array $data array(array("host" => $host, "key" => $key, "value" => $value), ... )
	 * @return string if a string is returned, something went wrong
	 */
	function zabbix_sender($data)
	{
		// open a socket to the zabbix server
		$socket = fsockopen(SERVER, PORT, $errno, $errstr, 1000);
		if (!$socket)
		{
			return "$errstr ($errno)\n";
		} 
		else
		{
			// prepare the string in the JSON format used by zabbix_sender 1.6.4
			$request = json_encode(array("request" => "sender data", "data" => $data));
			// send it
			fwrite($socket, $request);
			// read response 
			$response="";
			while (!feof($socket)) 
			{
				$response .= trim(fgets($socket, 1024)); 
			}
			$return = json_decode(trim(substr($response,6)),true);
			// check the response for failures
			if ($return["response"] != "success")
			{
				return "Response: " . $return["response"] . "\n";
			}
			// check if everything went OK
			if (!strstr($return["info"], "Processed " . count($data)))
			{
				return "Some keys failed to update: " . $return["info"] . "\n";
			}
		}
		fclose($socket);
	}	
?>

Using this script is childplay; Make sure you have the correct keys set up in Zabbix, have the port and host configured correctly in the defines, and make a data collector script + send it; like this:

Here i have a 'Testhost' with three items; a 'tv.in' a 'tv.out' and a 'tv.all'. To send the values to the zabbix_server, you give them to the function, which accepts an array filled with associative arrays with the keys 'host', 'key' and 'value' set. For example:

<?
	require_once("zabbix_sender.inc");
	$tmp = array(
			array("host" => "Testhost", "key" => "tv.in", "value" => rand(1,10)), 
   			array("host" => "Testhost", "key" => "tv.out", "value" => rand(1,10))
   			);
	print_r($tmp);
	zabbix_sender($tmp);
?>

With this function i should be able to collect and send tons of statistics to the server without having to fire up a zabbix_sender process for every key.