Monitoring kickstart

[hussainakbar]

I just installed Zabbix 5 on a VM on my LAN and am looking for kickstart instructions.

Do hosts send snmp traps to a designated server, or must the server poll each IP on the LAN? i.e. do I need to install & configure each server and network device?

I installed snmp package on another VM which is running CentOS 7. As per https://getlabsdone.com/6-easy-steps...nux-or-centos/ and other links, it appears to me that once the snmp daemon is installed, it listens for monitoring servers attempting to poll it for status updates and doesn't send events by itself. Anyway, so far, the Zabbix server doesn't show anything relating to this host. I have not installed zabbix-client on this host to see if I can get by with the generic snmp package only. I haven't configured any of the network switches yet, that would be once I can manage the hosts.

BTW, as all of these are VM's on my LAN, firewall server is off on each machine.

Edit: From https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...uickstart/host it seems that Zabbix agent should be installed on the host. I changed the interface type to SNMP. Tried V1 as well as V2. Still nothing.

Edit: Ah! It seems I need to add the Linux SNMP template

[tim.mooney]

It seems like you may have figured out the questions you were having, but just to confirm, Zabbix supports both SNMP polling and SNMP traps, but you need to set up either type. The template you've applied to your host(s) is likely doing polling. Using the pre-defined templates, especially the official templates, is a great way to get started and to learn some of the capabilities of Zabbix.

If you have a large network, especially one with many very similar systems on it, you may want to look into Low Level Discovery. That's a way to have new systems on your network auto-discovered and have one or more templates assigned automatically to the host within Zabbix. LLD is an advanced topic and you don't need to use it, it's just something that automates part of the process. It does require some potentially complicated setup by the Zabbix administrator before it's useful though. Again, it's an advanced topic.

[hussainakbar]

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, got most of it working. Now I am going into the advanced stuff, like monitoring Apache, JBoss, DB/2 and the like. I can figure out these things as I've been in the business for a while, just have bouts of laziness 8-)

[tim.mooney]

Look to the official templates for very high quality pre-defined configuration that can be either used directly (they support customization through macros) or serve as an example of how to accomplish many monitoring tasks. There is a separate area in these forums that has discussion for some of the official templates that perhaps haven't been completely finalized yet. A lot of recent work from the Zabbix developers has been to greatly improve the official templates.

There are also unofficial templates contributed by various users of Zabbix over the years. Some are very good, but always review those more carefully. Some of the older ones probably won't import into a modern Zabbix install correctly, so it might be best if you test them in a test instance first.

Good luck, and ask questions if you get stuck on something.