documentation problems

[rosen]

the documentation isn't helping me get zabbix configured. build and
install was no problem.

but chapter 3, 4 and so on? big problem for me. i have no idea which file
to edit. right now all i want to do is email myself when a disk fills on a
machine. there's a zillion and one action/param/option/attrib/... it's too
much of a terminology zoo.

i need an example of something i understand so that i can get some feel
for what zabbix calls a param/action/....

i'll be specific about one thing: chapter 4. dives right in to the terminology.
but ___what file___ is that stuff supposed to go into? the server? the client?

i tried finding examples on the web, didn't find any.

[nelsonab]

I can appreciate your frustration.

Let's see if I can help and start at the basics. You may have already come to understand most of this, if so then this might be useful to someone else.

So we have three basic components, Server, Agent and Other Source/Service (SNMP, trapper etc). The server stores all the information about how monitoring is supposed to be done (user parameters and trappers are exceptions/modifications to this). The Server communicates to the agents and the Other sources. The server and agent have two means of communication. Passive and Active. Passive is the default for most of the templates, this is where the server connects to the agent and requests a data point. Active is where the agent contacts the server to get a list of items it's supposed to monitor, it is then the responsibility of the agent to push it's data to the server. With SNMP data you can either set up an SNMP trapper or have the server query SNMP devices like it would an agent in passive mode.

The overall flow of data through Zabbix is as follows Hosts -> Items -> Triggers -> Actions. You must have a host to associate items to. You must have items for a trigger to work, and you can only perform an action if you have triggers to activate the action.

It sounds like you're confused with the configuration files. I talked about agents above, there are two kinds. Agent and Agentd. It's most likely you will want to use the second kind, agentd. This is the daemon version of the agent. The other is called by inetd. As for where the configuration files go the names follow the function. If you're using Agentd then you want the agentd config file. If you're running a server you want the server config file. All config files go in /etc/zabbix unless you configure your system otherwise.

Hopefully that helps a little. :-)