How to monitoring distributed software? Possibly with SNMP?

[NAR]

Hello!

I have to monitor a software (possibly with Zabbix) that runs on many hosts. The hosts are dynamically added and removed to the software, maybe one or two are known at startup, but the rest is not. My original idea was to put a small SNMP agent on all hosts running the software, configure that agent to provide the required data, but it's not feasible to add/remove the hosts from Zabbix. My next idea is to have an "agent" host that collects the required data (it would know about the added/removed nodes). Then run an SNMP agent on this host, provide an SNMP table with one row of data for each host running the software, indexed by some unique host id. Can Zabbix automatically detect the changes in the rows in an SNMP table? Is this approach sane, can it work? I have no prior experience with Zabbix, but have some experience with SNMP. I'm reading the configuration, but couldn't achieve this yet. I also looked into zabbix_agent and I see that it can be extended with modules. Would using a zabbix_agent Instead of an SNMP agent provide this feature?

[kaspars.mednis]

Hello,

If you have ability to install a small snmp agent on each host, zabbix can discover those hosts and automatically create host with required items/triggers/graphs

When the host will be gone, zabbix can automatically remove it from its host table

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/3.4/manual/discovery/network_discovery/rule

This approach works out of the box without any custom modules or scripting required.
Does it fit your requirements ?

Regards,
Kaspars

[NAR]

How can I add items automatically for the discovered nodes?

Hello!

Thanks, it looks promising, but I need to get more details. I created a discovery rule and it did find the nodes, but I don't see how to create items that show data from SNMP. Is it documented somewhere?

[kaspars.mednis]

Hi,

You must create an action, go to configuration->actions->select event source (Discovery)->press create action

Create conditions by discovery rule or whatever you need

Go to operations tab
Create two operations
* add host
* link to template

Documentation is here:

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/3.4/manual/discovery/network_discovery/rule

P.S
You create items by auto-linking template with items

Feel free to ask more questions if needed,
Kaspars

[NathanX]

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