monitor/display item on the fly?

[victorfuwei]

We use Zabbix (trapper) to monitor codes sent from external systems/applications. However, those codes are NOT predefined,
and we need a way to display those codes (via item/graph/screen in Zabbix web interface/UI) that are not known in advance. Is this achievable? And if yes, how? My understanding is that in Zabbix we can't create an item/graph for the unknown codes, since we need to know the monitor item in advance as a normal sense. Alex and/or other experts, please help. thanks!

[eskytthe]

You can use the api to create items etc.
http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.0/api
Or other tools:
http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/doc/api
BR
Erik

[victorfuwei]

cool. I believe you meant every time my application sees the new code(i.e. item to monitor), it checks whether the item exists first, and if not, it creates the item and also the graph, etc. Please correct me if I am wrong?

Since both known code (i.e. existing monitor item) and unknown codes may come that means I will need to do a get and then create for every data item (and every pull/push). could performance be an issue/bottleneck?
Thanks a lot!

[eskytthe]

Yes that was my thoughts...

Re. performance:
Maybe if you have huge amount of items to check/create.
But you can easily monitor internal zabbix server performance :

http://blog.zabbix.com/monitoring-how-busy-zabbix-processes-are/457/

Please also remember that you can send local timestamps with zabbix_sender - so your program will be independent from zabbix server performance.
(Zabbix_sender is the most effective way to send a lot of data.)
BR
Erik

[eskytthe]

Btw: At the zabbix conf. 2012 I discovered that some people put up an (own develop) zabbix proxy/application gateway that applications just can send data to with e.g. http - making a easy interface for developers / applications to send data to zabbix.
BR
Erik

[victorfuwei]

Are you aware of any existing zabbix proxy/application gateway implementation that supports HTTP? Open source implementation is preferred. If you know, please share the link. Thanks!