Monitoring system upime

[cmoehlenberg]

Hi All,
We are migrating from Solarwinds to Zabbix but what is the best way to monitor system up time?
In solarwinds we did this with ICMP/Ping but is this the same in Zabbix?

[vijayk]

You can use Zabbix agent or SNMP to monitor the uptime. You can also use ICMP/Ping to monitor it.

[cmoehlenberg]

If using Zabbix Agent this will be the uptime of the agent?
And the same goes for SNMP, right ? This will be the connection availability, or ?
Ping/ICMP is the network uptime, as I understand it. The server can be "down" even though servers is answering "ping"

[vijayk]

Agent Uptime and System uptime both are different. Ping is depends on Ethernet uptime.

[ISiroshtan]

If you want to check that system is up and running - ping would be the most generalised approach (if ICMP is allowed in your environment).

More targeted way - identify each system purpose and monitor that it performs designated duty (either checking the service is up via agent, or specific port of a critical service is accepting connection, or checking heartbeat of application on server you want to ensure is up).

If you migrating to Zabbix and actively building monitoring on using Zabbix agent - agent ping is quite important too. If your Zabbix agent is not running - system effectively not monitored. So it might be in healthy state or it can be silently failing outside of your visibility zone.

So there is no single definitive answer to your question. It all boils down to your exact setup and monitoring policies + extent to which you are ready to allocate work hours to customize the monitoring for your company exact needs.