Schedule Enabling and Disabling Devices in Zabbix

[rhudson]

Hi all,

We are looking at rolling out Zabbix to monitor our communications network and it is proving to be the perfect tool! However, we have a certain edge case that I would like to know if Zabbix can easily accommodate in an (semi) automated fashion.

We have some small portable 4G routers that most of the time sit on a shelf pre-configured but disconnected and get deployed to remote sites to provide VPN network connectivity when needed. When they are in use, they become extremely critical very quickly (responsible for managing emergency communications equipment). Currently, we are manually enabling and disabling the devices but this really doesn't scale well. As part of the deployments, the devices are pre-booked so we know in advance when they will be online and can tell Zabbix accordingly. I would much rather do this than need to click enable at a specified time as this has room for human error. The big thing that I want to prevent, is alerting when the device "isnt in use" to prevent alarm fatigue. The maintenance mode feature looks almost perfect but we are almost after the opposite. Whereas maintenance mode lets you schedule when to NOT monitor, we want to schedule when TO monitor as for the most part, these devices will not be online.

I hope this makes sense and if you have any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated! If you need any further details or examples let me know.

Thanks,
Rhys.

[tim.mooney]

There are multiple different ways to accomplish this, but any of them would use the API to do something to flag that a device is now "in use".

For example, with the maintenance period idea, you would:

1. Set up a maintenance window named something like "VPN devices not in use". By default, add all the hosts that are VPN devices to that maintenance window.
2. Then, when a device does need to be monitored, use the API to modify the existing maintenance window, removing the host that has gone into production

Alternately, the same thing can be done with host groups (use your action configuration to not alert for a "Not in Use" host group, use the API to move devices out of that group) or with tags.

[rhudson]

Ah interesting thought! Thanks for the reply.

So I see it as partially there. That's a much nicer way that I was seeing it (ignoring the API part) as getting other members of the team simply adding or removing a group association is far better than changing a maintenance plan!

As for the API part, where am I best of looking for help on that piece? My "ideal" is for one of us to set a start and end date/time for monitoring through Zabbix itself. I'm quite new to Zabbix so not too familiar with what its capable of extension wise.

Thanks for the help!