Interval Advice

[simpleton]

I'm new to Zabbix, and I notice that most of the templates seem to check performance every 60 seconds.

Is this a pretty safe interval?
Or should I bump it up to 5 minutes and then scale it back to ensure minimal impact on my servers? FYI: I have about 18 servers. All Microsoft. About 5 of which are mission-critical.

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

[BDiE8VNy]

In your case it should be pretty safe for a starting point -on condition there are no heavy (CPU,I/O, memory) 'user parameter' based items, etc.

In most cases the intervall is more relevant for the database size and performance than it is for collecting the values.

But don't underestimate the impact of many short intervalls. Generally set intervalls as high as they just make sense.
If an item should trigger an action for manual intervention, there is normaly no need to have an intervall in seconds, when the manual reaction takes tens of minutes.

With rising database size housekeeping becomes a pain and ends in partitioning the database, disabling housekeeping, adding more storage, etc...