Is zabbix for me?

[aaron.abs]

I support about 30 small remove locations. I do not have any sort of VPN connection between, only internet.

I have a zabbix server running in my main office. It looks like it's a pain in the butt to get basic monitoring going, so before I waste my time I want to make sure that zabbix can efficiently work over the internet.


Also, are there any tutorials out there that assist in the setup of Windows agents and what they monitor? the documentation is pretty vague and patchy.

Maybe there's a better product for my situation?

[swaterhouse]

Zabbix can monitor over the internet but you will need to open the firewall ports on both ends for the zabbix server and agent ports (i believe 10050 and 10051 by default).

Basically the quick hit list of what it monitors in windows is:
Disk Space
CPU Load
Memory Utilization
Event Logs
Ping
Uptime
Performance Counters


you can specifically see what items it monitors here:

http://www.zabbix.com/manual/v1.1/co..._supported.php

and here:

http://www.zabbix.com/manual/v1.1/pr..._agent_win.php

Scott

[richb]

We've got exactly the same situation. Lots of remote sites, with no VPN access back to our Zabbix server. Unlike Nagios and others, Zabbix copes with this situation brilliantly.

One thing to note, you only need open (inbound) ports on the server end - the clients will happily report back over NAT using Zabbix active checks without any port forwarding required.


How we did it:

On our office DSL NAT router we have a single port forward (port 10051) to the Linux box running zabbix. This allows the Zabbix agents to report back their data.

Within Zabbix you need to clone the template called 'Template_Windows' as 'Template_Windows_Active' (though the name doesn't really matter). Go through each item in this new template and change the type of the item from 'Zabbix agent' to 'Zabbix agent (active)'. There are some checks that are not possible using the active agent, I don't remember which off hand, but you'll see errors in your logs about these. I've just left them for the moment, I should really go through and disable them though it seems that everything still works fine.

A note for Debian package users: it seems that the version of Zabbix distributed on Debian stable at the current time (1:1.1.4-10) doesn't have this clone option, I assume this was added in at a later date since it's present in my custom-compiled 1.4 version. Either remove the Debian version and compile your own, or alternatively you'll have to manually copy the items over.

When you add new hosts into Zabbix ensure that you link them with the newly created template - 'Template_Windows_Active' rather than 'Template_Windows'. Leave the IP address of the host set to '0.0.0.0' and set the Connect To: option to IP rather than DNS.


There are no firewall / NAT changes required at the remote sites. Simply copy the zabbix_agentd.exe file onto the server in question, set the hostname to that of your NAT router which the Zabbix server is behind - www.noip.info may come in handy here if you don't have a static IP.

Something I couldn't find too much documentation on is how to install the agent as a service. The magic command (assuming that you copied zabbix_agentd.exe and zabbix_agentd.conf to c:\zabbix) is:

zabbix_agentd --config c:\zabbix\zabbix_agentd.conf --install

Then go to administrative tools, services (or enter 'services.msc' into start | run) and start the service. It may be worth watching the agent log to ensure that it's finding the server ok, but after a minute or so you should start seeing data being reported back to the zabbix server, appearing in latest data.

If anybody has any problems with this by all means drop me a P.M.


See also:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6715&highlight=active+checks

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6727&highlight=active+checks

[bbrendon]

Nicely written little tutorial!

A note for Debian package users: it seems that the version of Zabbix distributed on Debian stable at the current time (1:1.1.4-10) doesn't have this clone option, I assume this was added in at a later date since it's present in my custom-compiled 1.4 version. Either remove the Debian version and compile your own, or alternatively you'll have to manually copy the items over.

FYI, there is a 1.4.x series now in Debian. Its not in stable, but the packages are there.