Monitoring each single server on a web farm with Web Scenarios, or other suggestion

[Jackomo]

Hello guys,
I'm new to Zabbix (I'm using 4.0) and I'm self training across the web.

I have a web farm with some servers, let's say SERVER01, SERVER02 and SERVER03 behind a F5 load balancer, each one hosting a web application, let's say mypp.com.
I created a Host on Zabbix for each server, and a template to "group" them.
I'm interested in monitoring the status of myapp.com for each separate server. I thought that a Web Scenario created in the template would have done the job, but it just makes the HTTP calls not targeting each single machine, but simply passing through the balancer like every normal user would. In this case, even if one or two of the servers go down, the WebScenario is always OK, due to the load balancer action, which routes the traffic only to the working servers.

What I want instead is that each test call is performed on each separate server, so that I can monitor the internal health of the farm.

Is there a way to achieve this task? And if WebScenario is not the right tools, which one is it among those available in Zabbix?

Thanks a lot.

[tim.mooney]

So the "front end" URL that the F5 presents to client might be https://mypp.com but it is configured to (reverse) proxy and load balance 3 back-end locations, which might be something like http://server01.example.com/site07/mypp , http://server02.example.com/site07/mypp , and http://server03.example.com/site07/mypp

In that situation, to monitor each of the backends, Zabbix needs to be able to make an http connection to http://server01.example.com/site07/mypp , http://server02.example.com/site07/mypp , and http://server03.example.com/site07/mypp and have each of those backend servers respond. You can definitely achieve monitoring of these backend URLs, as long as the backend servers will respond to connections from Zabbix that bypass your F5.

If the backend servers allow direct connections, then a web scenario will work. Using a template for it is what I would do too. The main thing you need to do differently is that the template needs to reference the back-end URL, not the front-end URL.

PS: you probably want a separate web scenario for monitoring the front-end URL too. That doesn't need to be part of the template, as you only need to apply it once, rather than for each backend.