Zabbix 2.0.6 Backup Interface

[salzkrebs]

Hallo Zabbix-Community,

I am trying to find out if it is possible to have a Primary and a Secondary Interface on any given Host.
The behavior should be, that the Primary Interface is polled but if it is somehow not reachable anymore the Zabbix Server should switch to the Secondary Interface.

The reason for that is, that I have 2 Sites with different IP Sub-nets. In every Sub-net there is a cluster IP to poll for Devices which are connected to the System.
Every Cluster IP knows about all Devices and so I just want to poll the first one to get the Information I need but if its down I don't get anything. So i would like to have some sort of secondary Interface to take over the job.

As far as i tried things out now, I have assigned both IPs to the Host, doubled the amount of items so I can poll both IPs at the same time with the same Items, but this is useless overhead which can be prevented.

Is there a possibility to accomplish this?
I hope there is someone who can help me with this

Br Manuel

[aib]

Did you try to add one more Agent interface in Host configuration?

[salzkrebs]

Thanks for your answer.

Yes I tried this already, but the two big Problems are, that I can't choose in a Template which Host Interface is used for polling (so I would just make double the Items and one part has the first Host Interface and the second part the second Host Interface), and if one of those is failing I have to manually switch to the other Interface.

We have a Tool which generate the Templates and Hosts for us and unfortunately we can't make the Items in the Hostfile. We have to use Templates.
Maybe we will implement this in a later stage but for now it would be nice if we have another mechanism which allows us to switch between 2 Host Interfaces automatically.

Br Manuel

[salzkrebs]

Does anyone else know of another Solution for this issue?

You have a Host with 2 IP Addresses. If an Item goes to unsupported the Host automatically tries the second IP Address for this particular Item.

Br Manuel

[steveboyson]

What you could do is:
- have only the main IP address in agent interfaces on the host
- create a second host with only the backup IP as agent interface

Modify your template that the triggers evaluate the items for both hosts.

The trigger definition would be something like
(last("primary-host:your-item-to-check) > 0) || (last("backup-host:your-item-to-check) > 0)

where
* primary-host is the host with the main IP address
* backup-host is the host having the second IP address
* your-item-to-check is the name of your item which you want to be checked on both IP addresses

Probably you need two templates, one with triggers shown above (for main host) and one with identical items but without combined triggers for the backup interface. Otherwise you would get two alerts on failures.