Monitor ARP Entry On External Router

[pugop]

Forgive me for my ignorance. I'm relatively new to zabbix and trying to set up a proof of concept in our organization. So far I'm really excited about what zabbix is able to do and haven't run into any issues except this one.

I have an snmp item monitoring an arp entry on a router with OID's and values that look like:

SNMP OID: .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.22.1.2.1.192.168.50.1
SNMP Key: RFC1213_MIB__ipNetToMediaPhysAddress.1.192.168.50. 1

This works great and returns the mac address of the corresponding arp entry but my question is because the OID and key contain the IP address when the arp entry is lost the host item is put into a permanent "non supported" state. Every time this happens I have to manually edit the item to change the state to "active".

Is there a way to keep the item active even if the router returns an error? If there is not does anyone know a way to write a script to reset the item state to active every 10 minutes?

Thanks for any insight/help.

[nelsonab]

About the only way to consistently manage that would be to write a script using the API (Zabcon for instance) which reactivates a set of items every so often via a cron process.

[untergeek]

Or you could do the SNMP checks externally and send the value back via zabbix_sender. We have some SNMP checks we have to do that way for our devices. It yields a mix of SNMP v2 items mixed with trapper items in the same host, but all are snmp queries

[pugop]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll give those both a try and see which direction works best. Both seem to be really good ideas.

[pugop]

Quick update on this: unfortunately I can't find a way with zabcon to edit an item. I read a lot about zabcon and it seemed to be the right direction but I'm not finding a way to do a quick edit of an item to change the status to zero(active) from within the zabcon scripting environment. I'll keep researching but due to the lack of zabcon documentation I might have run into a dead end on this option.

[nelsonab]

if you pop up on IRC I can try to help. #zabbix on freenode. (I'm in the Eastern US and not always at my computer FYI).

Most of what you will need will be done through the "raw api" call.