Remote checking of services

[Sjeik]

Hi all,

I'm using Zabbix for a few weeks now, it's the perfect suite to replace both nagios and tools like cacti!

However, I do miss the Nagios approach of monitoring services: Zabbix relies on the information from the Zabbix agent (or SNMP), Nagios just did a check on port 25 and tested the response of the server.

Is there an easy way to implement this kind of checking in Zabbix? Of course I can manually set up a new set of items for every new host I add and connect those to triggers, but there must be an easier way?

Before people start to ask why I would like this: IMHO this kind of checking is just a little bit more reliable and precise. For example: my mail servers are behind a port forwarding firewall, what if one of my colleagues makes a stupid mistake and removes the port forward of port 25? Zabbix won't notice anything, since the mailserver itself is perfectly fine.

Thanks for your suggestions on this!

[Alexei]

However, I do miss the Nagios approach of monitoring services: Zabbix relies on the information from the Zabbix agent (or SNMP), Nagios just did a check on port 25 and tested the response of the server.

Use simple checks which are designed for agentless monitoring.

[Sjeik]

But with simple checks you need to specify an IP or hostname. It would be great if I could simply create hosts and connect them to a template to check them. Do you know what I mean?

[Alexei]

But with simple checks you need to specify an IP or hostname.

This is wrong! You MAY specify an IP to overwite host IP address.

[Sjeik]

Ah, you're absolutely right. Sorry for the stupid question!

[Sjeik]

All simple check accepts two optional parameters:
ip - IP address. Defult value is 127.0.0.1
port - Port number. If missing, standard default service port is used.

Examples of using simple checks:
ftp,127.0.0.1,155
http,11.22.33.44
http_perf,11.22.33.44,8080

So the default value for the IP is "127.0.0.1", but I want the Zabbix server process to check another IP! Furthermore, I get a "Not supported by ZABBIX agent" error if I try to specify a key like "tcp,587" to check if the SMTP Submission port is OK. What do you suggest I use as value for "key" to check an external server?