Interfaces and password and template relationship

[ThomasSondag]

Hi All,

I'm currently testing Zabbix for my infrastructure and I was really happy with it, until I tried to monitor several JMX applications on the same host.

Now I think there is a design flaw in Zabbix with the relations between the host Interfaces (Agent,SNMP, IMPI, JMX) and the authentication.

For IPMI for example the credentials are set for the host, but for SNMP or for JMX the credentials are set in the items (a least in the web interface).

I think the credentials should be defined at the host Interfaces level (Agent,SNMP, IMPI, JMX).
The interface should also define the protocol level (for snmp for example)

That will make more sense for me (and I hope for many others)

Same thing for the Templates, they should be related to one host Interface like the items, and not auto magically bound to the available host interfaces.
That will allow to have several JMX interface per host.

So the hierarchical relationship will be for example :
Host1 -> Agent interface -> credential -> templates
-> items -> triggers
-> graphs
-> IMPI interface -> credential -> templates
-> items -> triggers
-> graphs
-> JMX interface 1 -> credential -> templates
-> items -> triggers
-> graphs
-> JMX interface 2 -> credential -> templates
-> items -> triggers
-> graphs

Anyway, I had a look at the DB structure and I think this suggestion will be really hard to implement ...

I hope I made myself clear, big thanks for your work,
Thomas

[rrupp]

Yes, I agree, we're having this issue monitoring Java applications and about the credentials yes it seems unnecessary to define the authentication at the item level as for the same interface it should always be the same. To ease the credentials issue in our templates we just use macros for the user password so every item has {$JMX_USER} and {$JMX_PASS} and then at the host level you would fill in those macros values with the appropriate values. This helps at least by removing to need to change every item if you were to use different credentials.