Is Zabbix Right For me?

[spongebob14]

Im trying to find the right monitoring solution for my company and im hoping Zabbix is it.

We need to be able to connect over (cisco & open) vpn to 5-20 remote sites (each then containing about 10 centos machines) and run custom scripts or commands which check the status of our application on the customers site. If possible i dont want to install anything on the customers machines so the proxy option looks ideal.

Can Zabbix be easily used to do this. Do you configure the VPN in the main zabbix server make the vpn connection to zabbix proxies and pull back the monitoring results for a site for processing and alerting if necessary? Or do you configure the vpn outside of Zabbix and line up the times for it to connect when you configured the vpn to be open?

I have looked at nagios and didnt feel it could do what i wanted.

Any help would be appreciated!

[spongebob14]

follow up

Ive edited the post to make it a little clearer, hopefully it is a simple enough answer for any experienced users.

many thanks

[richlv]

couldn't you just have "always on vpn"

if not, you could just have some external mechanism to enable vpn every now and then. proxies would connect to the server whenever they can and push all the data they have collected.

and yes, proxies would be ideal in this case.

[spongebob14]

vpn

i couldnt have an always on vpn as there will be 10-30 different vpns (all cisco or openvpn) supplied by different customers to us, we would have to connect to each in turn to grab the results.

If i had cron jobs to open and close the vpns to each customer on a rota, does the zabbix server automatically know the connection to that customer is open and grab the results. Or do i also have to schedule a time for it to check that customer.

Im assuming then that it polls every minute or so, i would be looking to get results every 30 mins, quicker would be better but that is probably a realistic target time.

thanks for the response.

[richlv]

assuming you would use active proxies (suggested), they would just try connecting to the zabbix server. whenever that would succeed, they would push as much data as possible

[Colttt]

maybe you can use ssh instead?!
i think it is the better way, because openvpn is not only ON