Hey all,
One thing I love about Zabbix is how easy it is to make up your own custom checks. All you have to do is be able to feed it a value and tell it how to respond accordingly with a trigger. Awesome.
I find that more often than not, the easiest thing for me to do in an environment is to write a script and run it on the agent PC to call the zabbix_sender process and feed it a value. For example, I made up a template for checking windows updates. I run a vbscript on the server which calls the zabbix_sender process and tells it how many updates need to be installed. Then I have an item set as a zabbix trapper that gets this, and a trigger that fires if the value is greater than zero. The script is set to run on a schedule as a Scheduled Task from within Windows. 99% of the time this all works great, but I'm wondering if this is the best way to do it.
As I start to review this approach, there are a lot of pieces to make this work. A scheduled task, a vbscript, the zabbix_sender process, the items and the triggers. A couple of my pains with this apprach are the Task Scheduler can be flaky at times. Plus, if I update the script, I have to remember to update it on all of the servers. I'm wondering if there is a way to utilize Zabbix more to pull these off so there are less points of failure.
It's the same for Linux custom checks. Substitute cron for Task Scheduler and bash/PHP/Perl for vbscript. It really isn't an OS issue. The question would apply to both
Thanks for your advice!
One thing I love about Zabbix is how easy it is to make up your own custom checks. All you have to do is be able to feed it a value and tell it how to respond accordingly with a trigger. Awesome.
I find that more often than not, the easiest thing for me to do in an environment is to write a script and run it on the agent PC to call the zabbix_sender process and feed it a value. For example, I made up a template for checking windows updates. I run a vbscript on the server which calls the zabbix_sender process and tells it how many updates need to be installed. Then I have an item set as a zabbix trapper that gets this, and a trigger that fires if the value is greater than zero. The script is set to run on a schedule as a Scheduled Task from within Windows. 99% of the time this all works great, but I'm wondering if this is the best way to do it.
As I start to review this approach, there are a lot of pieces to make this work. A scheduled task, a vbscript, the zabbix_sender process, the items and the triggers. A couple of my pains with this apprach are the Task Scheduler can be flaky at times. Plus, if I update the script, I have to remember to update it on all of the servers. I'm wondering if there is a way to utilize Zabbix more to pull these off so there are less points of failure.
It's the same for Linux custom checks. Substitute cron for Task Scheduler and bash/PHP/Perl for vbscript. It really isn't an OS issue. The question would apply to both
Thanks for your advice!
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