Zabbix SNMP function

[Harry Han]

Hi

I'm a fresh hand to Zabbix,but I'm provide a zabbix solution to my customer. My suggestion is to install the zabbix agent on all the windows servers, Linux servers, Unix servers. but my customer thought it would be a threat to install an open source agent on their production servers. so they want to only to use the SNMP agent. My question is if use the SNMP, what can be monitored on the server? will the private service, such as CPU usage, disk load can be monitored? Thanks a lot!

[Linwood]

I am also new to Zabbix, somewhat (looked at it ages ago, but only now actually trying to use) and having a similar debate with a customer.

SNMP can get a lot of data provided it is up and enabled. It can even get some device specific items if you hunt around (e.g. HP Proliant have very hardware specific MIB's you can use). But it is limited especially on Windows by Microsoft's rather lackluster interest in supporting it (they even have called it deprecated though I find it hard to believe they will actually drop it).

Having the agent installed provides a direct link into windows you can use, for example some items might be easier (or more accurate) with WMI calls. Calling WMI from the Zabbix server is rumored to work (I have not done it), but is MUCH easier and MUCH more efficient to do from the agent as it is both built in and the agent is running on an already authenticated environment.

The user parameters also lets you run commands, like powershell, on the server to pull any arbitrary data you decide you want, e.g. you could run a SQL command on a SQL server and pass the result back. Hard to do from the Zabbix server in specific cases, and impossible to do as a general case.

I think the real question is what are you monitoring - agentless monitoring is perfectly adequate for things like "am I up" and "Are all the exposed services up" (i.e. ports open and responding). You can also monitor response items as complex as with HTML scripts to call up specific web pages, and get interface and disk drive capacity and usage. IF you work really hard at it you might be able to do service monitoring but that's an area where SNMP becomes pretty ineffective, and as you get deeper into what actually goes on inside windows it gets progressively worse (e.g. testing AD activity).

A lot of customers really are looking for surface monitoring -- things easy to find. In which case with SNMP you are golden. If they want in-depth OS or program specific monitoring you have an issue.

[f.koch]

Hi,
take a look here, this was presentet on the Zabbixcon 2015

http://www.slideshare.net/Zabbix/andrew-nelson-zabbix-and-snmp-on-linux

regards

[Harry Han]

Really appreciated, guys!