Monitoring on-site but also from HQ

[static0verdrive]

Hi guys!

My team and I have been testing Zabbix 4.0 and we are absolutely loving it. I'm hoping you can help me with the following...

We're looking to monitor servers at various sites from our HQ, but we also need the on-site tech staff to monitor their own servers. I realize I could put their servers into groups and give them access to their own group, but considering we are spread out over North America, we'd like the on-site staff to be able to monitor (and more importantly receive alerts for) their own servers and services even if the link back to HQ was inaccessible.

Based on my reading, I believe we'd need a proxy and server at each site to accomplish this, and then my server at HQ would also check the site proxies. The problem is the ServerActive= line, which is a comma-delimited list in the agent conf, doesn't seem to accept multiple values in the proxy conf.

Is there a way to do this? Should I just do away with the proxies and have the agents report to the local and HQ servers? My only worry there is it would be many more firewall rules than if I only needed to create one rule per site (rather than a rule per IP range or per server per site). I believe Zabbix JIRA feature request ZBXNEXT-1109 is in regards to this but it doesn't sound like it's done (or even necessarily being looked at) so I was hoping there might be some other way, or a trick for how to configure it.

Many thanks for any help you can provide!

-static-

[static0verdrive]

Am I overthinking this? I just realized maybe I can just have all the agents report to their own local server as well as their proxy that HQ can check. Any thoughts/recommendations or something I'm missing? TIA

[LenR]

Zabbix agent can be configured to be queried by more than one server(or proxy). You could add a local zabbix server monitoring only the local hosts. We have a second zabbix environment that monitors only if hosts are up. It gives us a enough to get thru longer outages on the main Zabbix. (Usually not caused by zabbix itself, but we used this during our 2.x to 3.x upgrade).

[static0verdrive]

Zabbix agent can be configured to be queried by more than one server(or proxy). You could add a local zabbix server monitoring only the local hosts. We have a second zabbix environment that monitors only if hosts are up. It gives us a enough to get thru longer outages on the main Zabbix. (Usually not caused by zabbix itself, but we used this during our 2.x to 3.x upgrade).

Thanks for the reply. This is what I ended up recommending to management after some successful tests (local server and proxy at each site, HQ server checking all proxies). I made the HQ server a VM that can Vmotion over to the second data center if needed, though in the future it will be private cloud but pretty much the same idea. Cheers!