Active Checks question

[donjjones]

We have several Win32 machines outside of our firewall that are behind their own firewalls across WAN links. They can now talk to our Zabbix server on port 10051 with the proper port open for that.

I'd like to be able to monitor these devices without poking holes in all of these remote firewalls for a Zabbix server to communicate with them. My question is, what is the best way to handle this? Are active checks adequate for this task? It's more or less comes down to the agents are the only way communication can be initiated.

Thanks for any ideas...

[safl]

Active checks are made for that purpose

But here are some alternative methods for monitoring your boxes:

1) Use zabbix_sender.exe and wrap a bunch of scripts around it and use it to send your data into zabbix server.

2) Send emails to your monitoring server and use procmail to forward the mails to appropriate scripts that parses the information inside the mail and executes zabbix_sender locally to push data into zabbix server.

3) If you are interested in security then wrap some vbscripts around putty's plink.exe to create an ssh-tunnel, then configure the zabbixagent to send data to 127.0.0.1, on the port you have forwarded via plink.

These are just a couple of suggestions as how you could push data into zabbix creatively
In my setup i use various combinations of methods for monitoring, windows servers run agent with passive checks, then for stuff that is not monitorable i use alternative methods. Such as configuring Veritas Backup Exec to send job info in mail into monitoring and parse the info, and using zabbix sender in various server scheduled jobs.

If you are a programmer, u could write an NT Service wrapping ssh tools and al sorts of other usefull stuff into it. I've done this in order to make automatic updates of zabbix agents possible and secure data transfer.

Enjoy Zabbix!

[donjjones]

Thanks so much for all of that info! Very informative post!!