Zabbix first Steps and Questions

[rherold]

Hi,

I 'm at the moment in the situation to evaluate monitoring solutions. I need to monitor Linux, windows, switches, storage and so on.
At first, I installed my own Zabbix instance and take a look around and try to understand the concepts behind it.
I have experience with plain old Nagios.

As far as I have understood now is that all what will be monitored run via templates which defined the checks, limits and so on.
Now I see the first problem for me, I have a large number of systems to monitor, but I need for each system other limits.
Must I now rebuild the templates for each system?

Which is the best way to keep the templates in sync by updates if I have so many custom ones.

Then I have found the function how to monitor web sides. But I don't found a way to let it check ipv4 and ipv6, not only one of them.
This is the same for other checks, can I configure doing it via IPv4 and IPv6 to see if one failed?

[tim.mooney]

You are not required to use templates, but if there are common things that you want to monitor, they are a convenient way to "bundle" items, triggers, and other things together, so you can easily apply a set of "monitors" to one or more hosts. You could completely ignore templates and just create all your items and triggers individually.

The best templates are per-host configurable via macros, which are variables used in the template that you can configure per-host (or per item per host) to adjust things like thresholds to your needs. Templates don't have to use macros; everything within the items and triggers could be hard-coded. The best templates use them extensively, though, to give you all the customization you need.

Assuming the templates you use are well-written and make good use of macros, you don't need multiple templates. You only need to adjust the macros for each host where something needs to differ from the defaults.

Regarding monitoring both IPv4 and IPv6 on a host, my site isn't very far along in that process, but I think we'll probably approach it by defining a second interface for a host that is specific to IPv6 and then selecting that when defining any items and triggers.

[rherold]

tim.mooney thx for your feedback. I will try to work this out. In meantime, I added two of my proxmox vms to the zabbix server via zabbix-agent2. Looks good so far, but some items keep red like Operating system (system.sw.os[<info>]) the error message is only 'Invalid first parameter.'. Also values like "Interface eth0: Speed" seems not to work (Value of type "double" is not suitable for value type "Numeric (unsigned)". Value "-1000000")

[guille.rodriguez]

just set this item to FLOAT, as error mesaage said, its UNSIGNED integer, so only positive values are accepted
Float accepts negative and decimal values

[cyber]

Looks good so far, but some items keep red like Operating system (system.sw.os[<info>]) the error message is only 'Invalid first parameter.'.

Parameter should be one of those listed in docs "full (default), short or name". if you left it there as "<info>", then its not correct. Leaving it empty assumes you want "full". "short" or "name" have to be specified.