Automatic update of agent

[safl]

Hello,

Feature suggestion, if would be lovely if the Zabbix Agent was able to update itself.
When monitoring is done with the Agent on 100+ servers it is a very time consuming process to upgrade each and every single agent.
So some sort of automatic upgrade of the agent itself would be really great!

Regards,
Simon

[James Wells]

Greetings,

We curently use cfengine to manage the agent upgrades agent config upgrades. Not the best solution of course, but it will work until Zabbix is capable of updating itself.

[tommie]

Actually, automatic updates is a bad idea. First of all, it would break several package systems on Linux which rely on checksums. It would cause inconsitencies. While not lethal, they are annoying.

Following this theme, a better way is to have package systems which upgrade automatically. From Windows you can do this with MSI, and every decent Linux distro has it. AFAIK Solaris lacks this, but that isn't Zabbix' fault.

Secondly, LDS. Installing a program in /home/zabbix "feels" wrong and I prefer to put it in /usr instead. This of course inhibits the "zabbix" user from overwriting it's own program. A security meassure.

[napel25]

For distributing user defined scripts (UserParameter) it would be an option to have a CFEngine like system. Otherwise with many servers or in a environment were servers frequently come and go, managing the scripts can become a time consuming business with a high risk on failure. Additionally to that it will disencourage you to change/improve/debug any script (okay, that can be an advantage as well).
So a nice addition to UserParameter would be a CFEngine like system. The disadvantage of CFEngine is the lack of support for Windows/Cygwin.

[Calimero]

So a nice addition to UserParameter would be a CFEngine like system.

Errr... why add a CFEngine like system as there is already CFEngine itself ?

Sounds a bit like reinventing the wheel to me, don't you think ?

[napel25]

Errr... why add a CFEngine like system as there is already CFEngine itself ?

Sounds a bit like reinventing the wheel to me, don't you think ?

The disadvantage of CFEngine is the lack of support for Windows/Cygwin.

I did test CFEngine for a while. The version I started with did have bugs while compiling on Cygwin. After I reported the bugs the bugs were solved. So there was a version that compiled on Cygwin. But the next release did result in a new compiling error on Cygwin. So there's probably no focus for Cygwin by the CFEngine developers.

[Calimero]

OK. But there must be other generic SCM solutions out there for windows, I guess.

[napel25]

Probably there is.
But for such system you need a check that can trigger an action, things that a monitoring tool is made for.
Maybe it's already possible to make it in Zabbix with shell scripting...