installation and configuration of a zabbix proxy

[alon]

Hi

I have recently installed a zabbix server V2.4.3 on centos 7 in my network and completed it's configuration,
now I have a remote network I want to monitor as well, located at a data center
I do not want to monitor the hosts there directly due to security issues, I wan to take advantage of the abilities provided by the proxy server,
I want to use the zabbix proxy as as a zabbix server as well so it will monitor the zabbix server I have to know if it stopped working.
so my questions are:

1. do I need to install the intended server as a zabbbix server and than add the zabbix proxy packages.

2. once zabbix server has been installed DB and all, will I need to install a separate DB for it's function as zabbix proxy or will it use the already existing DB.

3. do I create the data center hosts on both the zabbix proxy and zabbix server or just the zabbix server.

thanks in advance

[ingus.vilnis]

Hello and welcome to Zabbix forums!

Your initial approach will not really work as intended. You cannot install both Zabbix server and proxy on one machine.

Here is what I'd suggest you to do.
You have your Zabbix server installed and that is good. Leave it as is now.

In your data center you place another server and install only Zabbix proxy (and agent) there. Add your proxy to server's configuration. And when you do add the proxy machine as a host, please set the machine to be monitored by the proxy itself. Yes, proxy monitored by proxy. As strange as it may sound but you cannot get the correct proxy internal performance metrics otherwise.

Then you install Zabbix agents on the machines in data center and point them to proxy IP.

Next step is to create all those hosts in Zabbix frontend. Set them to be monitored by proxy.

And when you get this to run properly, then you can enjoy your distributed monitoring.

So you said that you want to get notified when the proxy is not accessible? No problem, use Zabbix internal item to see when the proxy has checked in last (zabbix[proxy,<name>,lastaccess]) and create a disaster trigger for that.

Another thing you wanted is to know when your Zabbix server is down. Proxy will not be able to tell that. Installing another Zabbix server to check it is not a good idea. The best thing you could actually do is to create a High Availability cluster on two physical machines for your Zabbix server so that it keeps running no matter what. There are some manuals available here on forum and www.zabbix.org on how to do it.

Hope this helps!

Best Regards,
Ingus

[alon]

thanks

Hi
thanks for the quick response, the explanation you gave me was very helpful.