Variable items

[Shoikan]

I was wondering if it is possible to create an item which monitors 'variable' items... Ok, I understand that this sounds weird, so I'll try to explain.

You have a system with 5 volumes/partitions/disks in it. You create 1 item 'disk usage' in the GUI, which will then go through a previously defined list (either provided by another item/function or the agent or whatever, or by a list or maybe a parameter in the item definition) and retrieves all the values for that list iteratively. Along with that you'd create 1 trigger which would be applied to all the values returned.

This way, if you get a new disk, you just add it to the list, or it gets detected automagically, or whatever... And you don't have to recreate the whole set of items and triggers again...

Is there something like this in zabbix?

[Calimero]

Nope there is not. That sounds like dynamic templating+item discovery. Some sort of sysadmin dream that doesn't work or usually produces lousy results.

You would have to:
- discover stuff automatically (what stuff ? by who ? how ?)
- know how to interpret new stuff showing up

That would probably cost a lot of development time to cover just a small subset (for example: patch zabbix_agent so that it scans what drives are available and report it to zabbix_server ...).

Spend just a few minutes writing specifications about this and you'll see that it sounds a bit like a nightmare (or something that would be useful only to you and just for some aspects).

[Shoikan]

Unfortunately for me, I see your point It would be nice if it were possible to make some sort of matrix-item though. One item that would check the same attribute on several objects... Even if you would manually have to maintain the list of objects... Ah well, I can see the technical challenges in this.

Back to manually creating 5-20 checks per database then

[Calimero]

The next improvement that should help is the API planned for zabbix 1.8.

At least it will help you script / automate a things bit.

[trikke]

Hi Shoikan,

I could have something u want:

Item:
system.run[df -lk|sort -rk 5|awk '{print $5":"$6}'|xargs]

Trigger:
{hostname:system.run[df -lk|sort -rk 5|awk '{print $5":"$6}'|grep -v zones|xargs].iregexp((9[5-7])%)}=1

So Trigger is True if filesystem space is between 96% and 97%

greets
Patrick