How to handle invalid items from LLDs

[clevelas]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I wasn't sure what to search for.

zabbix 4.4.4

For instance, I'm working on printer management. I have a supplies item prototype that displays the prtMarkerColorantValue. But not all supplies have this (A toner does, but a maintenance kit does not). So I get a red X and "no such instance" error. How do I handle this in the template? Do I use a pre-process entry to ignore the error? That means it's running the SNMP query and just ignoring the error. Do I leave the error as is? That at least disables the check for 10 minutes at a time.

Is there a way in the template to not create the item if the OID doesn't exist?

[clevelas]

In this case, the 'colorantvalue' was really a separate oid tree. So I made it a separate discovery item.

I'm still curious how people handle a case where a template includes something that doesn't work on a particular host. Is it worth cloning the template for a few changes? Perhaps remove those items from the base template and make a new one that links to it that puts those items back? That introduces the problem of how to assign the correct template to mostly-similar hosts.