Question about Active vs Passive agents

[TecDragon]

First I am super new to Zabbix. I have toyed with it off and on but this time I want to try to get it to work for us as it ties into our help desk. It feels overly complex but is starting to grow on me.

I want to use active agents as I eventually want to be able to monitor the windows firewall for changes as our business relies on servers talking to other servers and changes to the firewall cause us issues and when I googled it, google said I needed active agent to do that.

BUT... that is not my current question.

When I switch from passive to active I go from 199 items to 33. I only care about actively monitoring a few services so I figured out how to monitor those by creating an item and a trigger.

The question is do I have to manually add all 166 items that just get dropped by switching from passive to active? Or is there an easier way to re-enable them? If I have to manually add them back one at a time, can I do it where it adds it to all the servers at once or do I have to do it on a server by server basis?

Sorry, most of what I know I have pounded out myself or by watching youtube videos.

Oh and Zabbix is running on Ubuntu, but the servers I am monitoring are all Windows servers.

[Paradice]

I dont know, where you switch between active and passive. Usually both kinds of agents can be used at the same time.
Active just means, that the Agent (on Windows) send the data of the item, without any order of the Zabbix Server.
Passive data collection on the other hand needs to be startet by the zabbix server.

I guess its helpful, if you would make a screenshot, or tell us exactly where you switch between active and passive.

[TecDragon]

Wait... I can just use both? That's what I needed I figured - incorrectly - that it was an either or situation.

[TecDragon]

You can't use both - so back to the original question. Passive agent has 199 checks, active agent has 33 best way to fix?

[Paradice]

In the zabbix-agent.conf, you can configure 2 Values

Server=

and

ServerActive=

If both contains the IP adress of the Zabbix Server, you are able to monitor passive and active checks on the Host at the same time. I dont know, where you switch between passive or active, so it wouldbe great to do a sreenshot or something to understand your porblem.

[TecDragon]

Here are a couple of screen shots, both of these hosts are Windows Server 2019. With Active agent 32 items and 12 triggers, Passive agent is 184 items and 132 triggers.

I would just use the passive and be happy, but I eventually want to monitor the firewall for changes, and when I googled how it stated I need to use the active agent.

I downloaded the agent from the zabbix website and it is the same agent on both of these servers.

If I try to add the both agents I get the error message below

I couldn't figure out how to enable all of the checks that the passive agent is doing in the active agent.

Active Agent

Passive Agent

Error Message

[TecDragon]

I did the unlink and clear to switch from passive to active. Perhaps I need to unlink and clear, wait a bit and then link the active. Maybe I didn't give it enough time. I will try again on a different server and see what I get.

[TecDragon]

Ok this appears to be my own lack of experience issue, I am learning through Youtube videos - so... The 'Zabbix Agent' is linked to 'Zabbix Agent Active' I thought these were two separate protocols and was trying to add them both in the 'Templates' section. After reading and re-reading the error message I thought I would go to both the 'Zabbix Agent and 'Zabbix Agent Active' and remove the double linked items, only to find out the double linked item is\was 'Zabbix Agent Active' itself.

I appreciate your help and patience, talking it through helped me find the solution.