Zabbix Agent Installation and Adding Hosts to the Zabbix Server in 2023...

[Zabbix_To_Go]

Hello all. I just finished reading a lot of the articles posted here in the Zabbix Help forum and there's a lot of good information about agents, templates, and monitoring, but I didn't see exactly what I was looking for. I'm hoping to spark a discussion and generate some ideas about how we could install Zabbix Agent on a RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 mixed environment with some Production hosts, some Non-Production hosts; add each Zabbix Agent monitored host to the Zabbix Server, and configure a default template for monitoring all RHEL Linux hosts.

Our team is currently running Zabbix 5.0.27, and are monitoring a small subset of the approximately 200 RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 hosts we would like to eventually install agents on and monitor.

If you were to install Zabbix Agent on two hundred (or more) RHEL 7/8 hosts, add them to the Zabbix Server for monitoring, and configure a default template, how would you do it?

Thank you all in advance for you thoughts, opinions, and assistance.

[guille.rodriguez]

Use a tool like Ansible or Puppet for autodeploy and after that you can use Autodiscover to autoadd machines to Zabbix Server

[cyber]

ansible or puppet, yes. But why discover... if you already install agent, set correct parameters in config and let it do autoregistration. Registration action(s) can put servers in correct hostgroups, add templates etc.

[guille.rodriguez]

ansible or puppet, yes. But why discover... if you already install agent, set correct parameters in config and let it do autoregistration. Registration action(s) can put servers in correct hostgroups, add templates etc.

If you have 200 machines... do it manually is a bit slow ... with autodiscover machines will be autoregistered.

[cyber]

Well, end result is same.. you have your hosts in Zabbix...
I just don't like to keep unnecessary processes running. It is much more convenient, if a host starts up, says hello to zabbix server and autoreg takes care of template assignments etc. No need to search for possible endpoints in network..

[tim.mooney]

If you were to install Zabbix Agent on two hundred (or more) RHEL 7/8 hosts, add them to the Zabbix Server for monitoring, and configure a default template, how would you do it?

We use puppet to get the agents installed on our RHEL systems. If you're not already using a configuration management system, though, Red Hat is really pushing ansible. Especially if you use Satellite, you probably want to look at ansible first.

Once the client is installed, either of the options that cyber or guille have mentioned should work well for getting the basics applied. I think cyber's solution is simpler, especially if you only have to deal with RHEL. If you eventually expand to wanting to do the same thing for network devices (via SNMP), then discovery becomes more appealing.