AgentD Server List behavior

[Smoke]

Hello Community, this is my first post to into the forums so I would like to also take this chance to say hello and, of course, needless to say, and as you may have been wondering Im newbie into zabbix world so excuse me if the question is redundant, but so far i wasn't able to found the answer into the manuals.

I'm looking for a detailed explanation on what is the behavior of the agent daemon when it to comes to the "Server" directive in the configuration files, assuming that there is more than one server listed on (Comma delimited)

Basically, I'm looking to have an infrastructure with 2 proxies and 1 server, and split my agent/hosts load among those 2 proxies, lets say 50/50 , but need to look for fail-over alternatives, so i was wondering if i could include something like

Server=hostProxy1, hostServer
so when the proxy1 goes down the agents could send directly to the server?

or
Server=hostProxy1, hostProxy2, hostServer
so when the proxy1 goes down the agents could send to proxy2 (i assume i would need to change this in the GUI/conf of the proxy?)

Is this a feasible solution, specially the first one as is the most interested I'm looking for? If so, how does the agent perform, it tries to connect to the first on the list and when it fails it moved to the other? and when its already connected to the 'other/second' of the list, will it keep trying to connect to the first one or it will never retry?

Any details on this matter would be appreciated.
And once again, sorry if this is documented, just point me in the right direction.

Regards,

[tchjts1]

Server=hostProxy1, hostServer
so when the proxy1 goes down the agents could send directly to the server?

or
Server=hostProxy1, hostProxy2, hostServer
so when the proxy1 goes down the agents could send to proxy2 (i assume i would need to change this in the GUI/conf of the proxy?)

Is this a feasible solution, specially the first one as is the most interested I'm looking for? If so, how does the agent perform, it tries to connect to the first on the list and when it fails it moved to the other? and when its already connected to the 'other/second' of the list, will it keep trying to connect to the first one or it will never retry?

Any details on this matter would be appreciated.
And once again, sorry if this is documented, just point me in the right direction.

Regards,

You can read some information here: https://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43982

Your above scenarios would work only if you exclusively used items of type Zabbix agent. It would not work if you used Zabbix agent (Active) items. If you populate the Serveractive= field with more than one Zabbix server or proxy, your monitored server ends up flip-flopping constantly between the servers listed there. The Serveractive= parameter tells your host which server to connect to for Active agent items.

Populating the Server= field with more than one Zabbix server/proxies is fine. You would just need to select which one the hosts should connect to in the Zabbix GUI. The Server= parameter tells your host which server to connect to for passive agent items.

[Smoke]

Thank you very much for the reply, that does make sense, its more clear now!

[Smoke]

So as far as i understand, i can populate all my hosts with the following
Server=ipProxy1,ipMainServer

with that configuration, assuming all the hosts have the "monitored=proxy1" setting in the GUI active they will be connecting to the Proxy
If for some reason my proxy1 goes down i can go ahead and move all of those to be monitored by "no proxy" and it will be fine? they will then connect to the zabbix main server?

[tchjts1]

So as far as i understand, i can populate all my hosts with the following
Server=ipProxy1,ipMainServer

with that configuration, assuming all the hosts have the "monitored=proxy1" setting in the GUI active they will be connecting to the Proxy
If for some reason my proxy1 goes down i can go ahead and move all of those to be monitored by "no proxy" and it will be fine? they will then connect to the zabbix main server?

Your above statement is correct... provided none of the items on your hosts are Zabbix agent (Active). If you did have Active items, they simply would not return any data, while your passive items would.

Another thought to keep in mind. If you did have to re-point you monitored servers from the proxy to the main Zabbix server (or vice-versa), any items that are part of LLD rules (Network interfaces, mounted filesystems, etc) could take up to an hour for that specific data to start coming back in. That's the nature of LLD.

[Smoke]

Hrm, now im back to confused stage. In my scenario all agents are active (so they initialize the connection to the proxy/server), so, the items ARE active.

That does make sense for passive, as either the proxy will go and ask for data, or, if the proxy is down, it will be the server itself. but since im using active hosts/items it wont happen.

But once again, Server directive is used for Passive items, so it make sense to have proxy,server in it in case that any of them can ask for details BUT then whats the point of having two values in ServerActive?

If i have ServerActive=proxy1,server1 when it will use proxy1 and when it will use server1? or why would i want to do it?

Sorry if i totally messed up

[tchjts1]

You don't want to put 2 servers under ServerActive. It doesn't work the way you think it would.

Have you read this thread? https://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43177

zalex_ua is a support specialist that works for Zabbix. See his reply in message #3 of that thread.