Host is up : best practice ?

[bobyboy]

Hi all,
According to you, what is the best way to check if a host (computer linux or windows) is up ?
* A simple icmp ping ?
or
* A agent ping with a trigger like agent.ping.nodata(time)}#0

I think agent ping is better and you?

Tks for your help.

[alledm]

I have always had loads of problems with

agent.ping.nodata

because so I personally don't use it to detect if a host is down (but it is still useful to detect if the agent is down.


For hosts, I use the following.

ITEM:

icmpping[{HOST.HOST1},1,,,1000]

TRIGGER:

{Template_Host_Alive_Check:icmpping[{HOST.HOST1},1,,,1000].last(0)}=0 & {Template_Host_Alive_Check:icmpping[{HOST.HOST1},1,,,1000].last(#2)}=0

In my experience checking only against the last one might cause some false positives.

I also use DNS caching on the zabbix server otherwise I would have problems if the DNS server goes down.

With this setup for me it has been 100% effective and no false positives.

[alledm]

You could probably avoid false positive by increasing the timeout to 3000 ms I guess but I am happy with the current configuration.

[bobyboy]

Tks for your help alledm.