Multiple Templates per Host

[mirko]

I am pretty new to Zabbix and maybe my suggestion already exists, but
in my opinion it would be great to have the possebility to assign multiple Templates to one host!

Let's say we have 10 Windows Hosts. 3 MySql Hosts, 3 WebServers, 2 Mail Servers, 2 DNS Hosts

It would be great to assign to all Hosts the Windows Template and then specific Templates based on the Applications they are running.

So we would have the following template assignements:
3 Hosts: win32-Template, mySQL-Template
3 Hosts: win32-Template, apache-Template
2 Hosts: win32-Template, mail-Template
2 Hosts: win32-Template, DNS-Template

If that is not possible it would be great to have an option to copy a host with all item's & co.. So it would be easier to setup hosts.

Any feedback is more than welcome!

mirko

[keme]

Multiple Templates per Host

I'd also like to see the same features.

Some of my hosts are unix hosts, so I'm using the host.UNIX template, but they also run snmpd for additional stats which aren't available with the host.UNIX, so I'd like to link it with host.SNMP as well.

duplicating the whole lot into a host.UNIXSNMP seems like a lot of work and wouldn't offer quite as much flexibility.

Thanks.

[Alexei]

This will be seriously considered for ZABBIX 1.2 (or 2.0) roadmap.

[mirko]

Great! Thank you so much for your great work!

looking forward to hearing from you soon... ;-)

[eli.stair]

Alternate suggestion, easier to implement and satisfies same need...

I agree that having the ability to easily modify the "item" members assigned to a host is a critical need. Allowing the assignment of multiple templates to a host is necessary, but after a cursory look it seems it might not be simple to achieve; since it seems that a host obtains its template by the 'templateid' matching another row's 'hostid' in the same table.

Another tact that should be quite easy, would be to split out a separate table just for 'templates', and then build the templates using a similar method of inheritance, where the "host - templateid' would match a "group" template you define as containing sub-templates via a JOIN. This seems an easier/cleaner change to the schema than having multiple members for a template.

The real reason I see this as a potential benefit is to allow building-block host template generation, based on small groups of user-defined contents. For example, I've got at least ten host templates built in Cacti for a variety of Foundry, Cisco, and other network devices alone. Instead of having to build from scratch the FULL contents of each one (and that gets tiring), if we based this on nested inheritance from other template rows, we could make changes to the underlying templates (allowing you to build smaller ones for OSPF/BGP/ARP,IF,IP/FCAL/MYRINET/etc) and have them included or excluded at a higher level, with changes to those templates/rows being immediately propagated by their dependency.

I'm new to this, so correct me of I'm wrong, just looking to propose a low-impact way to get these features that we need.

/eli

[Clansman]

Hi everyone,

[first post]

Just registered to suggest just this: Multiple templates per host OR host group.

Zabbix is a really great tool! Congratulations!

Cheers,
Pedro Venda.

[attila]

This will be seriously considered for ZABBIX 1.2 (or 2.0) roadmap.

A thought on this, without really looking at the insides - maybe it would be easier to have templategroups, which could have template members. Thus you would still have one template(group) linked to a host (should be easier to code it seems), and would also be able to make template building blocks, and even propagate changes in templates.

[fmtaylor2]

maybe I did something wrong but...

I dumped the original host.unix template and did a search and replace to unique-ify it (multiple times) and pushed the results back into the database.

This resulted in a number of additional templates for me to customize. However since I could not grok the relationship between templates and triggers, the triggers did not get duplicated. So, to solve this problem I linked the new template with the original host.unix template which resulted in a multi-level configuration like so:

/Host.Unix/Host.AIX/aribadevapp01
/Host.Unix/Host.RedHat/arts
/Host.Unix/Host.HPUX/bulletin
/Host.Unix/Host.Solaris/ecourses-dev-1

Now anything I change in the host.unix template propagates to ALL unix hosts, or I can add specific checks for each host type at the OS level and those propagate to all the hosts in that template group. I am not sure if this can be done from the gui without the database export/import thing I did, but I can see where it would be very usefull for others to be able to do this.

I want to try to add another template to a host, but I don't want to risk messing it up, (any worse than I already have).

[wschlich]

I would also love to have that feature.
Alexei, any schedule for 1.2 or 2.0?