Different topics to monitor, how to setup easy?

[RichardNL]

Another newbie on Zabbix over here.

I have setup Zabbix monitoring our 17 switches and (at this moment 14) Cisco Meraki AP's by SNMP/ICMP. This works great, but I'm loosing focus because all of the problems reported by Zabbix. Most of them are non-conserning for us. For example, a switchport is reported because the linkspeed has lowered. This issue is well known and happens when a user shutdown's his/here PC. On the other hand, I have a few interfaces that are very important for us, for example the trunk port of our stacked switches, the fiber port to our darkfiber network or ports that are connected to PLC's for the factory.

I'm happy with all of the interfaces beeing scanned by SNMP because the function of the ports switch regularly and in the future, maybe a different port needs to be monitored, but i have the feeling I'm not in control of what is beeing monitored. I'm searching for an option for Zabbix that I can choose what interfaces or items should be monitored and being reported when changed. All the other thing found by SNMP are fine, nice to have/see, but just leave them there. I'm aware of the function to filter out thing by the macro option under the discovery rule, but as i said, its fine that the rest is there too. Thing can/will change, and maybe, the thing we don't monitor now, can be need to be monitored next week. We have 3 stacked switches, with only the first switch having fiber connected, we have non-stacked switches with fiber attached, switches with an ethernet uplink etc, Also, the same thing for our servers: I want to monitor 1 Windows server (with 3 disks) only the C:\-disk, whilst other servers only need the second or third disk to be monitored.

So, what I am searching is an option to choose what we want, for example:
Switch 1 (Found over 1000 items by SNMP, only monitor the following) :
---- Trunk 1
---- Trunk 2
---- Ethernet 1, 5 , 6, 8, 21, 36, 42, 44
---- Fiber 1

Switch 2 (Found 411 items, only monitor the following):
---- Fiber 1
---- Fiber 2
---- Ethernet ports 7, 16 and 19

Windows server
--- Ethernet adapter status down/up
--- Ethernet adapter bytes send/received
--- Disk space D-drive
--- CPU utilization
--- Memory utilization

Windows server 2:
--- All disks
--- Memory Utilization


Any thought on how I can reach such a setup with ease?

Zabbix 6.4.1 running on Ubuntu 22.04 with MySQL

[RichardNL]

Well, last week a colleague had an unsuspected surprise. He wanted monitoring data of one switch interface . So, in this case, I was happy i could deliver the requested data as all interfaces were monitored. Though, I'm still looking for a easy way to quickly choose which interface should be monitored and which not. I'm receiving about 70 problems a day about interfaces I... don't care :P. I could go to the host, filter out all interface checks, disable them and only enable the interface i need, but is this the right solution?

[cyber]

Those templates have filters, which define, what is discovered and monitored and what not... You can modify those and get your desired result... You can also choose to gather data for everything but have triggers only for selected (Overrides)
Look for macros section in template.

[RichardNL]

Those templates have filters, which define, what is discovered and monitored and what not... You can modify those and get your desired result... You can also choose to gather data for everything but have triggers only for selected (Overrides)
Look for macros section in template.

In our case, the last option would be great, but I have completely no experience with this level of monitoring or programming. When looking in a template, for example "HP Enterprise Switch by SNMP" I can see the macro's, the different triggers etc. When I go to the Discovery Rules, I can see the specific rule "Network interfaces discovery" with the LLD macros and filters. I don't know what to change to achieve our wish. Are there any examples how to achieve this? I have searched on topic with interfaces, but didn't find any clear information about this topic.

Also, when a device is already 'discovered', then its done, everything is gathered and setup by the template, if you want to change thing you should un-link the template and re-link it?

[cyber]

You don't need to unlink... if you do the change in template, it will be picked up automatically by all hosts, where this template is attached.

Those macros in templates usually define a regex, what is then used in LLD filters, so by changing those macros, you limit the things that filter allows through... In many cases they are just ".*" to pass everything. They are a starting point, "one size fits all"... But you can change it and only deal with interfaces where name matches certain pattern etc..
Being completely Zabbix illiterate does not help.. Documentation is pretty ok, but there's quite a lot of it and you do need to know terminology etc...
https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...evel_discovery is the related part, but starting from beginning does not hurt.. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual