Distributed monitoring

[sr1]

Hi,

Firstly i have to admit that i am a complete novice when it comes to Zabbix and also apologise if this had been answered.

However i have searched the documentation and forum to find an answer.

We are looking at using zabbix to monitor 32 seperate locations each with approx 60 - 80 hosts each. I have looked into using a proxy on each physical site. From what i have read the proxies would not send the actual values for items to the central zabbix server.

I then read that to achieve this nodes could be used.


Could someone please advise if i undrrstand this right as it looks that proxies would be a simplier option however it is vital that the actual item values are forwared to zabbix server foor reporting purposes.

Many thanks in advance,

Adrian.

[Axilla]

in a distributed monitoring system, the data is kept in a local copy and synch'd with the main zabbix server. You can also do administration of all nodes from the main frontend in a distrubted setup, however it does have quite a few draw backs. Make sure that you're ok with these draw backs before switch to a distributed system.

I have ran both distributed and non-distributed setups of zabbix in a production environment, but never used Proxies.

[mgoodman]

Depends on your use case.

Proxies do get all data and send it all to the master. They are very simple to setup and maintain. But there is no GUI or alerting mechanism. So, if the connection to that proxy site goes down for some reason, and a system within that site also goes down, you won't hear about it and won't even know about the outage unless you decide to look at historical data. You can (and should) setup your master to monitor your proxy though -- so you'll at least be notified of that outage.

It really depends on your use case. In a situation where you have multiple field sites all running separate services, nodes may make more sense. In a situation where you have a primary site and a backup/DR site, proxies may make more sense. But even that is oversimplifying it.

My advice would be setup a proxy at first, because it's very simple and easy to maintain. If you feel you need more functionality, and are willing to deal with more work, switch to nodes.

[Axilla]

the most important feature of distributed is independent notifications..

What stinks about distributed is having to maintain each sites user and hosts and such which don't share.

in my opinion.