Generate screens through API

[StephenKing]

Hi,

has anyone here ever created screens automatically through the API (with data coming from a CMDB)?

I'd like to have a screen for each of our physical servers and its VMs (one host per row) and different metrics (cpu, mem, net, disk, ..) in the columns - with data coming from Chef (every VM has a role on which server it's running).
So during every Chef run, all the screens are regenerated to reflect the current distribution of VMs on hosts.

Could anyone share such a solution (which, of course, has to be tweaked a bit to our needs?

Thanks
Steffen

[rrupp]

I don't have an API example for this but just wanted to note that Host Screens (template screens) are a useful way of doing this, the downside though is the Zabbix frontend doesn't really make them easily accessible. If you have a template like "windows" or "linux" or "Virtual Machine" that has all the items tracked in it i.e. cpu/disk/memory etc. the template also has a "Screens" section which you can build out what are called Host Screens using those graphs. But they're sort of hard to find from the frontend, basically they're only accessible if you have host name link visible somewhere for instance on the "Latest Issues" area or the "Lastest Data" screen if you don't have a host selected, you can click the host name link and go to screens. Hopefully, in newer versions of Zabbix they make these screens available via Monitoring--->Screens with a host drop down box or something.

[StephenKing]

Hi rrupp,

thanks for your reply.

I've seen these Screens before, but not only because of the fact that they are really hard to view afterwards, but also because (I think) I can achieve the same with the usual Screens with dynamic items. I've got a "Single host screen", which shows me all the values for a host that can be selected.

My point is also a different kind of dynamics: I want to show multiple hosts (if possible all of a certain group) in one screen. The config management should just put the host in the correct Host group (e.g. physical_123) and the screen should show the value for all hosts in this group.

As I think showing the graphs for all hosts of a group in a screen generated by zabbix, I think the easier to achieve step would be to let the config management put the screens together. I think that should be possible (but I was, yet, too lazy to sit down, so wanted to ask if anybody already has working code for this).