Configuring lots of clients

[kmradke]

How do people managing large numbers of agents distribute Zabbix config file changes and other utilities such as scripts and executables to all those machines?

Other monitoring tools seem to have ways to remotely edit and push files to each client and I was hoping I had just missed how to do this in Zabbix. This is the one functionality I'm really starting to miss inside of Zabbix...

[elvar]

How do people managing large numbers of agents distribute Zabbix config file changes and other utilities such as scripts and executables to all those machines?

Other monitoring tools seem to have ways to remotely edit and push files to each client and I was hoping I had just missed how to do this in Zabbix. This is the one functionality I'm really starting to miss inside of Zabbix...

Yes, I have a huge need for this as well. I would really love a group policy package that allows you to auto name the agent based on computer name then I could push the agent out to 1000 computers at one time in windows. As far as linux, I haven't tried it yet but it may be possible to do what you want in a linux environment using Puppet.


Regards,

[Murilex]

Hi,

I don't know if some stable/unstable version were released, but there is a project very interesting about deploying zabbix agents:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16652

[elvar]

Hi,

I don't know if some stable/unstable version were released, but there is a project very interesting about deploying zabbix agents:
http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16652

Thanks for the heads up on this by the way!

[RHP-997]

realize i'm reviving a thread but..

We handle the naming of the agents by re-rolling our RPM with a patch that comments out the Hostname entry in the config file. The default behavior is to use the fqdn as the Hostname if not defined.

We also add the include dir in our patch so that we can easily distribute configurations (such as server) and user params in rpms that just place files in that directory.

[pHiney]

windows + linux

Linux:
we handle it with a sed line which is run in the post build script.
eg

sed -i "s:^Hostname=.*:Hostname=$HOSTNAME:" /etc/zabbix/zabbix-agentd.conf

we also put the master server's id_rsa.pub in the target server's authorized_keys at build time too, which helps with copying files, running things remotely en-masse, etc.


Windows servers can use things like psexec to run installs remotely. sed is available for windows, but if you can run an executable through GP, then run a batch file instead. it will run the installer, and then creates a new conf file just using simple echo statements (you really don't need the comments in the conf file in production) substituting %HOSTNAME% as appropriate. wscript and other simple tools probably have ways to edit a line in a file.

start /w installer.exe
echo "entry1=" >zabbix-agentd.conf
echo "entry2=" >>zabbix-agentd.conf
echo "entry3=" >>zabbix-agentd.conf

p

[EnigmA-X]

How do people managing large numbers of agents distribute Zabbix config file changes and other utilities such as scripts and executables to all those machines?

Other monitoring tools seem to have ways to remotely edit and push files to each client and I was hoping I had just missed how to do this in Zabbix. This is the one functionality I'm really starting to miss inside of Zabbix...

I guess you don't want this as part of Zabbix, but on a higher level... like OS-level. You don't want each application to have it's own customized way of deploying/managing config files.

Luckily, you were not the first to think about this problem

For Linux systems, have a look at cfengine or puppet. If you run RedHat, you can look into running your own RHNS, but this only pays off with a large amount of servers (>200). There are more options available, just google for alternatives