Monitoring without opening end device ports

[troyadams]

Is it possible to use Zabbix Agent without having to open up a port for every client system i need to monitor.

I have Zabbix being setup in a a data centre, and want to monitor remote client systems of Win32 and Linux for Stuff like ping,diskspace,etc. I dont really want to have a port opened for every server at my clients sites as some have 10+ servers and this would require 10 different port forwards on their firewalls.

I was hoping that the agent could just send the info over to Zabbix on a fixed ip/port.

I have tried this, but cannot seem to get any results.

[James Wells]

Greetings,

It sounds like you are wanting to use Active Checks. In this mode, the client runs a Zabbix Agent, which queries the Zabbix Server on startup to determine what to check. The Agent then performs these checks and sends the results back to the server. Please note that you will still need your firewall to allow packets originating from the clients with replies from server.

[troyadams]

Yes, thats what i want. Just didn't want to go around opening firewalls on client systems for the Zabbix server to reach the agent.

If the agent sends out all the info and does not need to be polled from the server end, then thats great!!

[James Wells]

heheh. Then in answer to your original question... Yes, Zabbix can do that. Please note though that you want to use 1.1Alpha12 or higher to do that correctly.

When you configure your hosts in the Zabbix UI, you will need to ensure that you select Zabbix Agent (Active) as the item type. Anything else does a poll from the server to get the results. Also note that not all checks work against Zabbix Agent (Active), check the documentation for which ones are available to you.

G'luck.

[Alexei]

Also, make sure that agent's Hostname (see zabbix_agentd.conf) matches host name defined on ZABBIX server side.

[elkor]

what if the server connects via IP address?

[James Wells]

what if the server connects via IP address?

The host name still needs to match. When the agent connects to get it's list of active checks, the agent sends it's hostname, as configured in the zabbix_agentd.conf file. The server then queries the database, against the hostname that the agent supplies, to get a list of items to check.

[elkor]

hmmmm ok. I haven't rolled out active checks yet so I'll need to find a way to reconcile this, as problems go though this isn't too bad. Is it case-sensitive do you know?

[James Wells]

I am fairly sure it is not under MySQL, as MySQL is case insensitive. Been too long since I used Postgress, so I am not altogether sure if it is case sensitive or not. Not looking at the source for this particular function right now, but IIRC it is something like;

select * from items i, hosts h where i.hostid=h.hostid and h.host='%s'

The %s gets replaced with the hostname supplied by the agent.