Can i get the display to show Windows Servers that are off/online

[Wils]

Hi all,
Never used Zabbix before and we're looking for a monitoring tool whereby we can firstly get Zabbix to display the Windows servers it picks up on the dashboard and then put them in green if they are online but to flash them to red if they go offline (as well as email a notification) but I cannot find a guide anywhere to say that this is even possible ?
So far (I only installed it yesterday) I have got the "Discovered Device" screen to show all the IP's on the network but that's it so far. Just really wanted to know firstly if what we want is possible with Zabbix and then how to do this if it is ?
Going forward I'll then add the switches etc to show the same way.
Thanks in advance.

[rthonpm]

If you install the agent on your servers there is a built in trigger to let you know when the agent can't be reached after five minutes, or when the server can't be pinged.

While you can do basic ping up/down monitoring without an agent, by using one you're able to gain a good deal more information about the host.

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[tim.mooney]

Hi all,
Never used Zabbix before and we're looking for a monitoring tool whereby we can firstly get Zabbix to display the Windows servers it picks up on the dashboard and then put them in green if they are online but to flash them to red if they go offline (as well as email a notification) but I cannot find a guide anywhere to say that this is even possible ?

Yes, something like this is possible.

You're going to have to read the documentation to get there, though. You want to pay special attention to the "Configuration" chapter, to understand the various ways you can collect data (items), how you set up thresholds (triggers) to determine when a value is a problem, as well as actions to take (which includes alerting) when a problem is detected (or potentially, when it's resolved). There are pre-configured templates that contain a default set of items (data) to collect and the way to collect it as well as default threshholds that can be configured per-host via macros, but no pre-built template is going to be perfect for every environment so you may want to develop your own templates based on the existing ones. If you just use the default templates without any thought to their settings and applicability to your environment, you're just going to end up generating a lot of alerts that you don't want, so I strongly encourage you to think about what you want to monitor and how you want to monitor it before you apply any of the pre-existing templates.

Once you have all the monitoring and alerting working, then you focus on your second requirement. The Zabbix web GUI (aka "front end") uses dashboards for graphical display of the information that has been collected, and each dashboard can contain a mix of widgets, each with various types of data being displayed. There are a number of pre-built dashboards that do things similar to what you want, but I don't know if there's a prebuilt dashboard that does exactly what you want. Again, though, you can build your own custom dashboards to tailor the display the way you want for your environment.

[Wils]

Sorry for the late reply but most of the monitoring systems we've tried so far all seem to have a point of waiting about 10 minutes before it deems systems to be offline which to me is far too long as by that time i've got hundreds of staff calling me to tell me this within 1 minute so before we go down this route can we make the changes from the defaults to notify us if a server or switch is offline within say 20 seconds ? without this then it's a no-go from the start ?
Thanks
Ian

[cyber]

It all depends how often you check. Want to be notified after 20sec. 5-10 sec interval and trigger on top of it.

[rthonpm]

You can set the status as low as you want, but you also need to be careful of not setting the threshold too low which could give you false alerts due to unrelated network latency or even a lag in Zabbix reporting. In our environment, we've found that setting the checks around 60 seconds is sufficient to filtre out most false positive results.

For switches and other hardware you may want to also look into SNMP templates for your particular hardware which may give you better warnings of potential issues than just a simple ping. As you learn more about Zabbix you'll find that you can monitor or record just about anything. The more information you can collect the faster you can react to any issues, or have better information to troubleshoot.

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