Comparing values between hosts

[rts]

I need to ensure that certain monitored items are the same on a group of servers, but I'm not sure how to do this with Zabbix.

A simple example would be to know whether a file has the same checksum on all hosts.

I've searched in the forums, and the only example I can find is http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7570 from 2007, and which seems a little inefficient as you have to use SSH to check each server, then just get Zabbix to record whether they're the same or not.

Has anyone got a solution to this?

[richlv]

using your example, grab file checksum with zabbix agent (see items page in the manual) and then compare it to a known good source in trigger expression

[rts]

Thanks richlv. However, that wont work in our circumstance. The file is automatically generated by a process which runs every hour. I want to confirm that the same data is present in this file across all nodes. So, there's no permanent value of checksum against which I can compare in the trigger.

Any other ideas?

[untergeek]

Create a zabbix item to return the checksum for each host (how many are we talking here?)

Figure out a "master" host (which will always be recognized as having the master copy of the checksum).

If you need to template, that makes things a bit more tricky, but you ought to be able to compare each host to the "master". If it changes every hour or so, give yourself a 5 or 10 minute window for the other files to sync up (or whatever you think it might be). That way you won't get notifications when it is "change" time.

[linuxgurugamer]

At least with Zabbix 2, you can't have a template item compare against a single system, it gives the following error:

Incorrect trigger expression. Trigger expression elements should not belong to a template and a host simultaneously.