Zabbix traps/alerts including ifDescr

[nyjetfan]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Zabbix but catching on quickly. I find it to be very powerful, but I'm trying to figure out how to get some more information with some traps/alerts sent to our monitoring.

Currently Zabbix will send an alert about a switch saying interface G1/2 went down, but as we have many switches there's no way to tell if that is concerning or not. Is there any way to have Zabbix include the ifDescr with the alert? For example, the switch will have descriptions of what is connected to each port and including that in the alert/trap/notification would allow the network guys to know which is most important or who to engage (ie it could be a printer vs an executive office vs a core server), but without the ifDescr there's no way to know without logging into the switch.

Would appreciate any inputs/ideas.

Thanks!

[HellLordKB]

I realize this is old, but incase your still looking for answer or someone else is, I am replying with the below. Your question is part of a greater question I had a while back and took me a while to figure out the best way of doing it after i did it the hard way.


If you have items for both ifDescr.# and ifStatus.#, you can use the special {#SNMPINDEX} and {#SNMPVALUE} macros in those keys for all the interfaces. Once you have item prototypes or items for ifDescr, and IfStatus as new items, you can use use those items keys ITEM.NAME, ITEM.VALUE in your triggers and notifications.

Two helpful things:

1) A good way to figure out how to use the Included macros in zabibx in your items, triggers, notifications, etc is by reading and scrolling through the macros supported by location page. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...ed_by_location


2) If you haven't learned about LLD Low level discovery yet its worth understanding it well, as when you start using SNMP for things like network switches, the number of interfaces on the switch and the depth of the SNMP MIB tree, LLD with SNMP in recent version of zabbix makes monitoring and notification on switches INCREDIBLY helpful. Before LLD with SNMP I was using an older ZABBIXEXTRAS pack that included an SNMP Explorer and getting all the SNMPINDEX and SNMPVALUES as individual entered numerical items for each interface,e.g. .1 .2 .3 etc.

If your working with SNMP in zabbix I highly recommend you learn about the awesome LLD Discover feature of zabbix and how to use it with SNMP.


Like anything else in tech, you figure out how to do what you need the easy way, after you do it the hard way.

[nyjetfan]

Thanks for the assistance - I was able to figure it out and also after doing so came across a couple of useful writeups/information that I wanted to post here for anyone else who might come across this issue/thread.

For configuring interface description (ifAlias in SNMP terms) to be in the triggers you can see the link here -

http://sysnet-adventures.blogspot.fr/2014/04/zabbix-display-network-interface.html

Also, linked from that page shows how to configure the graphs to show the interface description as well.

Also worth noting the description was truncated at 20 characters and how to fix that can be found here:

https://svn.zabbix.com/browse/ZBX-4303