Track Manual tasks to be done on several hosts

[pgorod]

Hi, I am quite new to Zabbix and I am using it to monitor ~10 hosts. These are all pretty much clones of each other, very similar.

Sometimes I fix something in one of them, like change a setting, uninstall an add-on from an app, etc, and I think "I really should do this in all of them", but that takes too much time when I am in the middle of other challenges. Then typically I forget it, neglect it, and end up solving the same problems over and over.

Is there any nice way to get Zabbix to list all the hosts that are missing a manual task, and just have it keep track of "done/not done", like a checklist?

I know I can just use Todoist or some task app, or a piece of paper, but I believe this would allow me to be more methodical and to keep everything related to the maintenance of these machines in one place.

Thanks in advance for guidance or ideas :-)

[Moob]

Hi,

Well, Zabbix is a monitoring tool, not a management tool. You probably could create something you want with scripts and creating templates for it. But would that help ease your workload ?

If you really want to manage your 10 hosts centrally check out Ansible to see if it is something for you, or some other management tool. Or simply manage your 10 hosts manually

Regard

[pgorod]

Thanks, but still... I am just starting to go through the learning curve of Zabbix. I have also had the work on installing and configuring agents in all hosts.

I am not looking to restart that whole process for a different tool such as Ansible.

I understand that Zabbix is focused on monitoring, not acting on the hosts; but my question explores the "borders" of that monitoring. Can I also monitor "custom things" that Zabbix doesn't even have to know about, just keep track of them as I tell it? It doesn't sound hard to do; although maybe nobody ever thought of making it possible.

[cyber]

Zabbix can monitor your custom things, via Userparameters for example. It is a method to do things, that are not there out of the box... extending agents capabilities. But it all depends, how complex things you want to do and how much you need to configure things for that... sometimes it may be easier to find another tool..

If you have selected amount of files that time to time get updated, you may check for file checksums for example, and compare to some "master host"...

At one point it would be better to have a configuration tool to keep configs up to date and in sync.. puppet for example. Or ansible playbooks to deploy configs..