Passive checks in ZABBIX?

[mbaehr]

Hello all. I have just started evaluating ZABBIX today. One very useful feature we may need is the ability to have external jobs report back to zabbix. On one server in particular we have several cron jobs which, at the moment, report their final outcome to a remote nagios instance as an external command (passive check); nagios then updates the status of that job.

As far as I can tell, with zabbix I must have the agent initiate the check? Any way to have an arbitrary check simply inject a status result directly into zabbix?

[mbjoerling]

In the agent you can make use of an external command, which makes a periodic check on a specific file that the external program is putting it's information into. That's one way. Else you can write a plugin for the .net agent, which then can listen for incoming events and then can make the agent reports instantly when new stuff is coming in.

[crayons]

Of course zabbix has this feature. Use the zabbix_sender program instead. At the end of your program in crontab have it run ./zabbix_sender and it sends your value to the correct server/key on the zabbix server. This will as you say inject a new status instantly when ran. It requires no agent.

I use it all the time for similiar types of reports run in the crontab for the company I work for.

./zabbix_sender --help
ZABBIX send v1.1.3 (23 October 2006)
usage: ./zabbix_sender [<Zabbix server> <port> <server> <key> <value>]

[mbaehr]

Of course zabbix has this feature. Use the zabbix_sender program instead.

Excellent! Thanks.