This software makes me feel like an idiot. I need help.

[kimobaksh38]

I'm not sure what my problem is, maybe it's that I have so little Linux experience, but am I wrong to think that setting this software up is unnecessarily complicated?

I have Zabbix 3.0 running on Ubuntu 14.04LTS. I've got it monitoring a few SNMP traps and such, I got templates working, so I'm not totally lost.

I can't get any Windows agents to talk to it, but if I go to Monitoring -> Discovery it shows green for all the agents I've installed. No host items show up anywhere though.

I can't figure out how to get LLD working. The directions seem to assume you know an awful lot about Zabbix. Is there a how-to for braindead children? I don't know about you guys but when I read 'automatic discovery' I don't equate that to 'spend half an hour developing a script and discovery rules and macros and and and and' for every device.

I can't get mail delivery of alerts working. I know it's a configuration problem somewhere - tests from the CLI work fine - but there's no way to test it short of manually defining a trigger and setting it off every time I want to try a change. Similarly there's no way to verify that yes, the server is talking to a host - I have to constantly jump back and forth between command line and GUI, because there's no snmpwalk or ping or anything in the GUI to do diagnostics with.

I'm not trying to knock the product. I can see how powerful and flexible it is. And I really want it to work. But it is not very 'figure it out' friendly.

Is there not a default repository of things to monitor or common items to check or something? Do I really have to sit here and manually define every single possible item in advance? What's the point of LLD then? How is that different from just dumping a bunch of OIDs into a template by hand?

If anyone is willing to hold the hand of someone who just doesn't get it, I'd appreciate it.

I guess what I want it to do is find a device, name it by its hostname, and give me some basic monitoring stuff to start with. I can tweak it afterwards. It just seems unnecessarily complicated to have to do it all by hand.

Thanks for any help. Sorry for whining.10.0.0.0.1 192.168.1.254

[NilsA]

Hi there,
lots of text and I think I'm going to start by addressing your LLD problem. The official documentation has some very helpful sections about it for different item types.
I'm going to assume, you want to create an SNMP discovery rule. The main benefit of using one (in a template of course) is that for things like network interfaces you may have a 24-port switch and a 48-port switch and a couple others with fewer ports.
To get items for every interface you'd normally need to create an item per port per information. Using templates you only have to create an item per interface once and apply the template to your hosts. Using LLD you only have to create an item once regardless of how many items there will be.
This means that LLD can save you a lot of tedious work.

To use LLD with SNMP, you need to define variables in your discovery rule and tell zabbix which information to write into it. We do this by putting into SNMP OID in the discovery rule: "discovery[{#VARIABLENAME},.OID,{#VARIABLENAME},.OID]".
In every prototype defined under this discovery rule, you'll be able to use those variables (items, triggers, graphs).

If anything is unclear, you can read up here: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...y_of_snmp_oids