Zabbix 5 - Assistance with how to monitor disks using smartmontools

[greavette]

Hello Forum,

I've installed Zabbix 5 on a new server in preparation to using this to monitor our small office. I see there are templates created by the community to monitor hard drives using smartmontools but these templates are not updated to work with 5. So I'm curios if Zabbix 5 can monitor hard disks using smartmontools without the need for a community template?

Is there documentation from Zabbix 5 to assist me in how I setup monitoring of my servers hard drives? I like what smartmontools can provide me with details on the health of my hard drives.

Thank you.

[tim.mooney]

You can always create your own custom items and triggers based on your needs. The community template can serve as a guide for what someone else did, but you may want to do things slightly differently for your environment.

Since you apparently can't import the template, you may need to examine the XML directly, to see what the template is doing. Or, install an older version of Zabbix on a small VM and import the template into that older version, just so you can see how the items and triggers and other stuff appears in the web interface. If you do that, you don't need to interpret the XML, you just need to re-create the same configuration in your version 5 server. It's not as simple as importing a template, but it also allows you to decide if you want to do things the same or make changes as you're modeling your setup based on the template.

[greavette]

Thank you tim.mooney for taking the time to respond. I will consider this course of action.

I was curious if Zabbix 5 brought any improvements to monitoring disk health and predicted failures like smartmontools does? I'm just getting back into monitoring with Zabbix so I'm unfamiliar with what disk monitoring Zabbix 5 can provide me out of the box.

Thank you.

[tim.mooney]

Most of the built in things that Zabbix collects data about (items) are more tailored to the operating system than to a specific piece of hardware, although for hardware where it makes sense to use SNMP, if your SNMP interface exposes information about the hardware it's close to "built in" to Zabbix.

Zabbix has great extensibility, though, so extending it with smartmontools and items based on data returned from smartctl or other tools makes a lot of sense.

Zabbix 5.x brings many improvements to the software, and the work that's been done on the official templates has greatly improved their utility. I'm not aware of any new features that are specifically beneficial for hardware monitoring, but there are a lot of features that are just generally beneficial.

If you take the community template for smartmontools and improve it and make it work with Zabbix 5.x, please share it. It would no doubt be beneficial to others.