Monitoring Custom Hardware over UDP

[orgsol]

I have several custom hardware devices on the network that broadcast a UDP packet containing an ASCII string with performance factors comma seperated.

My question is can Zabbix be easily adapted to monitor the UDP ports the data is broadcast on and develop a simple parser to insert the parameters into the database ?

If so can anyone provide pointers to where I might look to start using it to monitor these devices.

[nelsonab]

I think you will need to write your own trapper of sorts to trap the data from the unit and then send something to the Zabbix server using zabbix_sender or some other method. You could also write your own custom agent, but I don't think this would be the right direction, if you are interested in that route I have written up a simple library for creating Zabbix agents in Ruby here: http://trac.red-tux.net/browser/trunk/ruby/agent.

As for the trapper route, you might be able to use something like netcat to listen for the connections and then use zabbix_sender any time you get a new line. I think you will need to play around with this a bit and ask some more questions. :-)

[orgsol]

Thankyou for the advice, some searching yielded the thread http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19180 which looking at the code I may be able to adapt to receive my stream and put into zabbix.

I will look at your suggestions as well.