Template issue: Network interface names

[ebonweaver]

So in order to try to make life easier, I created a template I'd apply to all my Windows servers which includes the things I want to monitor like CPU, RAM, and Network IO. The problem is that while some template items have the intelligence to modify to fit the host they are applied to, network items do not. specifically, net.if.in and net.if.out in which you must put the name of the interface you want to monitor. Because it has no way of knowing this interface once applied to a system, it can't get any data. You can't modify the item because it comes from a template. You can clone it, disable it, modify the clone, but that's not very clean. In addition, if you have a graph using this data in the template, the graph isn't smart enough to use the identically names items that are not disabled, so the graph is empty because it's using the template items that don't work. You can't clone a graph, and you can't make a graph of the same name, so these particular graphs are useless in a template.

Adding some logic for the net.if.in and net.if.out items in a template so that you must add or can at least modify the interface name in the key once applied to a host is kind of vital, otherwise you simply can't template it which is really unfortunate.

[BDiE8VNy]

Wouldn't that be covered by Low-level discovery?

[...]You can't modify the item because it comes from a template.[...]

One can use a User-macro in place for constants in item parameter. This way one can set this macro to a default value within a template and override it on host level.

[m_gularte]

https://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39883

[ebonweaver]

Perfect! {IPADDRESS},bytes was the magic answer, and it solved another issue I had with a system that was reporting zero traffic when using the interface name, where this shows proper data!

How can we get this in the manual? I find this vital and invaluable information that is completely absent from the 2.0 information on agent keys.

[BDiE8VNy]

[...]How can we get this in the manual?[...]

Create a ticket at https://support.zabbix.com/

[ebonweaver]

Perfect! {IPADDRESS},bytes was the magic answer, and it solved another issue I had with a system that was reporting zero traffic when using the interface name, where this shows proper data!

Well apparently I spoke to soon, it DID solve that issue, for a short time. Then the agent on that machine decided that net.if.in[{IPADDRESS},bytes] is not supported.

This is not the first time I have seen a key that a client arbitrarily decides is not supported. Any ideas how to clear this up? All the other systems using the template are still working, and they all use the same OS version, so it's clearly a software defect of some sort causing this failure. If you enable it again, the next sample returns it to not supported, but as we know it IS supported.

[emz]

Is this fixed?

Could somebody confirm whether (and how) that issue has been resolved?

[kloczek]

So in order to try to make life easier, I created a template I'd apply to all my Windows servers which includes the things I want to monitor like CPU, RAM, and Network IO.

Don't get me wrong .. I think that you wasted a bit time doing this from scratch.
You should start using as much as possible from standard templates adding on top of them own templates with some extensions.