Feature requests

[vsergione]

1. Full tags inheritance
Tags are nice, but the fact that the tag inheritance is very limited (only trigger tags are inherited from the trigger defined in the template) make the tag configuration job much more difficult.
So, I would love to see the ability to configure some tags on the template level and see those host inherited in downstream by the host and triggers.

2. Macro expanding in tags values on the host level.

[cyber]

Event that is generatet inherts all tags, from whole chain. Host, item, trigger, template.. What part confuses you?
Macro expanding in config? it would make everything slow, I think... I think it is also mentioned somewhere in docs ...

[vsergione]

I know that the items and triggers defined in a template will inherit the tags defined at the template level. But this does not help too much in our scenario. Let me tell you more about it:

We manage ~7000 host grouped in multiple sites. Each site has a name, a siteId and a teamId assigned to it, which should be configured as tags per each host, since we need this info in the alert handling (alerts trigger ticket creation in Service NOW and pass those tags in upstream). Unfortunately this has not always been the case in our setup and now we have to do it. This means creating scripts to assign the tags to each host. Done that already, but... to mistake is to be be human and when processing this much amount of data (we had to review all hosts manually, identify owners, device type and so on) we ended up in a quite a few cases that we missed some of the hosts or we mixed up the information. Imagine now that we have to review all of them to find out which are the wrong ones. So a lot of steps involved, each a potential point of failure.

In my opinion, a better approach would have been to assign those tags in a centralized manner, either to a host group (I am aware that hostgroups do not have tags - would love to have this feature too) or to a template and just assign the hosts to them and the tags to be inherited automatically. This way we would end up managing the tags only for a handful of objects (the templates). To be clear: the sole purpose of those templates in this setup would be to configure the tags. No items, no triggers.

I am aware that there are multiple paths to achieve what we need and of course we will not wait for Zabbix to bring these feature into production. We actually almost completed the task using the API (we even developed a tool to make our job easier: https://github.com/vsergione/zbxwizz).

But I've felt that it must be an easier way. Zabbix is doing an exceptional job at monitoring stuff (stuff is the right word, because it can monitor almost anything - I love it by the way!). But Zabbix is also part of many large scale infrastructures, with tens of thousand of hosts. Monitoring those hosts is one thing, taking care of the problem is a different one. The problem handling involves identifying the right owner and so on. In bigger organizations you have maybe hundreds of persons taking care of this. So we end up managing a lot of meta-data only for this part. Making this meta-data a little bit more centralized would for sure improve the life of the Zabbix admin.

[cyber]

I know that the items and triggers defined in a template will inherit the tags defined at the template level. But this does not help too much in our scenario. Let me tell you more about it:

We manage ~7000 host grouped in multiple sites. Each site has a name, a siteId and a teamId assigned to it, which should be configured as tags per each host, since we need this info in the alert handling (alerts trigger ticket creation in Service NOW and pass those tags in upstream).

You have hosts... Host have inventory... populate it. It has currently no customizable fields, but you can just agree among your team, which fields will be used... in templates define tag values as inventory macros.
Site -> {INVENTORY.LOCATION}
TeamId -> {INVENTORY.POC.PRIMARY.NAME}
etc...
As all problems from that host inherit those host level tags, your are good to go...

You have servicenow, I would assume you use their cmdb also? Create sync script, which takes that info from cmdb and inserts to inventory...