Terminology & Documentation...

[TheEdge]

G'Day,

I am a recent (as of 4 hours ago ;-)) user of Zabbix and I am really happy with it. However as a newbie I found the following very hard. (I am using 1.0 under Fedora Core 3 so perhaps this has been addressed in 1.1)

- There is no documentation about overall what the various daemons do and how they interact. Ther is mention that you don't need the agentd daemon but not much more than that. A topology overview of how Zabbix "hangs together" would be nice
- There are no man pages for zabbix, zabbix_agentd etc.
- Why are there 2 conf files for things. ie zabbix_Agent.conf, zabbix_agentd.conf?

[jyoung]

- There is no documentation about overall what the various daemons do and how they interact. Ther is mention that you don't need the agentd daemon but not much more than that. A topology overview of how Zabbix "hangs together" would be nice

Its in the docs, but takes a bit of visualizing. Perhaps a diagram would help describe what is going on better?

- There are no man pages for zabbix, zabbix_agentd etc.

I don't see how a man page would be entirely useful. Zabbix is a graphical utility that cannot be summed up easily in a manpage. The current documentation, IMHO, is quite thorough compared to other projects. A simple man page could be created to breifly describe the system, although this would need to be manually placed in the man directory as Zabbix currently has the administrator place the binaries and frontend files where they like. (no "make install" command, remember?)

- Why are there 2 conf files for things. ie zabbix_Agent.conf, zabbix_agentd.conf?

agent and agentd are seperate programs. agentd (note 'd') is to be used as a daemon process while agent (lack of d) is for use with (x)inetd.

Feel free to point out any discrepancies, I'm still learning the power of Zabbix myself.