Disabling Zabbix agent

[nits]

Hi Forum,

I am new to Zabbix and monitoring.

In order to minimize the load on the Zabbix server, my plan is to disable zabbix agents. Please let me know how I can disable them or any other alternative to minimize the load on Zabbix server?

Regards,
Nagendra

[vicbc]

Hey Nits.
What's you env configuration, OS, Zabbix version, how many hosts are monitored, all-in-one setup or standalone for each component.
Most of performance issues in Zabbix are related to misconfiguration of Data Base.

Let's see if we can work it out.
Feel free to ask stuff, don't get intimidated for being new to the forum.

Cheers.

[cyber]

That agent has so small footprint, that you will not notice any improvements on server itself... Or if you notice, then your hardware is very much underpowered for a server anyway..

[tim.mooney]

Hi Nagendra

When you say "disable zabbix agents" (plural, meaning more than one agent), are you saying you're going to disable zabbix-agentd running on several other systems you're monitoring, in an effort to reduce the load on your Zabbix server? That probably will reduce the load on your zabbix server, but that would be a last resort for most sites.

If you've deployed a Zabbix server and installed the zabbix agentd on a bunch of different client systems (maybe some Linux servers, maybe some Windows servers, etc.), and now your Zabbix server is too busy and can't keep up, it's probably not related to how many agents you have in your environment (or it is, but it's only related in an indirect way), it's more likely related to

1. how many items you are collecting.
2. how often you are collecting the items
3. whether you're using primarily "Zabbix agent" (which means "passive" monitoring in Zabbix terminology; the zabbix_agentd is "passive", in that it doesn't automatically do anything, it waits for the server to connect and tell it to gather things), or whether you're using "Zabbix agent (active)" for most of your monitors. Using "active" monitors shifts some of the load to the agent running on the clients; now it doesn't wait around for the Zabbix server to ask for stuff, instead it gets a "to do" list from the server and then periodically runs those items automatically.

In particular, if you've done a new install and you applied the official templates to all of your clients, then I would say that the official templates are great (and they're getting better with every release), but they are also fairly "heavy weight". They monitor many, many things. If you use a template (or multiple templates together) that collect 300 items every minute, and then you apply that to 100 clients, you've started collecting 30,000 items on a very frequent basis. I'm not trying to suggest you don't use the official templates, I'm just saying that if you're server is a little underpowered (like if you're trying to do this with the example Zabbix VM), you may want to consider copying the official templates to a custom name, and then removing stuff from your copied template that you don't need to monitor, or increasing the frequency (meaning don't check every minute, perhaps check every 5 minutes) for the less-critical items. Again, I'm not saying the official templates are bad -- they're awesome! But many environments can comfortably monitor even 1/2 of what's included in the official templates.

In addition, Zabbix performance depends heavily upon the performance of the database it's using. Once you are collecting more than a few hundred items, you may want to start looking at database settings that can improve how the database performs.

Tim