general advice on adding new hosts/items

[mconigliaro]

hey guys,

i've been playing around with zabbix on a test box for about a week, so im pretty comfortable with most of its features. now i have a brand new zabbix box up and running for our production stuff, and im about to start adding new hosts/items to the database. i was just wondering if anyone had any advice for doing this.

to clarify, i noticed there are a few default templates for monitoring everything under the sun, but i'm not sure if these are meant to be useful defaults, or if theyre just examples of what zabbix can do. there's a lot of stuff in the default templates that i dont need, so i wonder if i should just make my own defaults from scratch, only choosing what's important to me (minimalist approach). i can always add more items later if i need them, right? then again, maybe i should be using the default templates for my hosts, and just removing the items i dont need.

mostly, im just curious as to how others have approached this. any advice would be appreciated.

[johnl]

i found the best thing to do was to configure a template with every possible item/trigger you would ever want to monitor for you servers. configure this template with the delays you want, the alerts eg email/sms whatever and then add new hosts based on this template. you can always then go through each host and disable the unrequired items for that particular server.