Retrieving a value from a Web Test

[mpureka]

I have an interesting scenario, where I would like to use Zabbix to fetch data from an external application.

The application in question makes data available via HTTP request - if I connect to a properly formatted URL, it returns a bunch of values. Is it possible for me to use Zabbix to capture one or more of these values?

So, for example, if I went to:

http://testserver.com/data

And it returns:

Status: OK
Users: 10

Is there any way that Zabbix can return the value 10?

[richlv]

definitely. exact approach would depend on some other factors like amount of values you want to retrieve and how long it takes to open such a url.

possible solutions :

1. use external checks on zabbix server to parse the page;
2. use userparameters on the agent to parse the page;
3. parse the page with a script and send values with zabbix_sender.

[mpureka]

Right, so this is more of a job for an external check and less of a job for a web scenario. That's the path we're moving down now, performing a wget on the page and parsing the output.

[richlv]

just beware of external checks tying up zabbix pollers. userparameters might be a better choice, and if you have lots of values, script + zabbix_sender an even better one

[mpureka]

Can you go into a little more detail on those alternatives?

[richlv]

http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/...ser_parameters

http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/.../zabbix_sender

[mpureka]

Resurrecting my own thread here as I'm finally getting around to trying to cut this over to user parameters; The documentation is quite clear on how to set up a user parameter, but seems to contain absolutely no information on how to actually retrieve the data from a user parameter as a Zabbix item.

This seems like a crucial bit of information - once I've defined my user parameter in the agent config file, how do I actually access that data?

[richlv]

as any other zabbix agent item, using the key you specified in the config file

[mpureka]

Oh. I see. It didn't occur to me to think of the 'key' defined in the user parameter as the same as the 'key' that gets entered when creating an item.