StartAgents - Not sure what this means.

[abel5405]

Greetings,
I have been going through the Zabbix Documentation and I am trying to get a hanlde on "StartAgents" in the Windows Conf file.

Number of pre-forked instances of zabbix_agentd that process passive checks.
If set to 0, disables passive checks and the agent will not listen on any TCP port.
The upper limit used to be 16 before version 1.8.5.

Is this like the number of threads and agent would use to run items on a single agent? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.

v/r
Chris

[brunohl]

Each check uses one instance of Zabbix Agent, depending on how many checks per/sec, and how long does each check takes to return.

Example:
If you have 1 agent, and 3 checks that run simultaneously, maybe your agent won't be able to respond on time, maybe it's time to pre-fork more agents.

[abel5405]

Each check uses one instance of Zabbix Agent, depending on how many checks per/sec, and how long does each check takes to return.

Example:
If you have 1 agent, and 3 checks that run simultaneously, maybe your agent won't be able to respond on time, maybe it's time to pre-fork more agents.

Thank you Brunohi for your quick response. I just want to make sure I understand correctly, the Default setting is 3 for pre-fork agents. This means it is allowing 3 checks to be done simultaneously? I did notice that any external scripts being use such as some PowerShell scripts we are using seem to run serially, one after another. Are external scripts affected by this? I tried going through the documentation but could not find anything that explains it well.

The reason I am asking is that we are going to be deploying Zabbix for the first time and on some servers I am concerned that the update interval may be to shallow for the number of checks we are doing. On one SQL server we have over 590 items discovered that are valid targets to monitor. Should I change the Pre-Fork setting on the agent I guess is my main question. Again many thanks for your time and help.

[brunohl]

Yes, external scripts, created by UserParameter obey this configuration as well.

The reason I am asking is that we are going to be deploying Zabbix for the first time and on some servers I am concerned that the update interval may be to shallow for the number of checks we are doing. On one SQL server we have over 590 items discovered that are valid targets to monitor

Depends on how many checks will be done by sec, on average. You can start with 3 agents and then, if you see that your checks are not being returned, pre-fork more easilly.

[brunohl]

Or, I guess you could use zabbix_trapper or active agent

[abel5405]

Understood, thanks Brunohil, I most appreciate your time and help.