I'm running Zabbix 1.6.4, with 1.4.4 agents on AIX 5.3. Once in a while an item will stop updating, and I can't seem to find a good way to get the items to start updating again. In the past I've had to remove the host from the template and clear history to get this item to start updating again. Does anyone have any advice on getting this one item to start updating properly without losing all of the other history?
-
-
A few things come to mind.
First - try matching the agent (Binary and conf) version with the server version.
Second - what is your update interval for that item? If it is more than 60 seconds, try making it 60 or even 30.
Lastly, I would try making that particular item an Active agent item. I have had good success in graphs where line rendering was spotty. For Zabbix Agent (Active) to work, the Hostname=xxxxx field in zabbix_agentd.conf must exactly match what you have in the frontend for the host name. -
I have a number of items that were "stuck" not being monitored. They used to work fine, and nothing I do seems to make them start collecting data again.
I just tried this, updated one of my "stuck" items (disk space % free) from "Zabbix Agent" to "Zabbix Agent (active)". This seems to have fixed my issue, though I find it incredibly annoying that I have to resort to this kind of black arts voodoo to fix problems.
EDIT: is there any harm in changing all items from "Zabbix Agent" to "Zabbix Agent (active)"? More network chatter perhaps, anything else?Last edited by jgerry; 02-02-2010, 17:14.Comment
-
Well, it would be even more incredibly annoying for it to still be stuck. No?
There is no voodoo about it. There are benefits to using Zabbix Agent (Active) anyway. All of my template items are active with the exception of one item in each template Usually the passive one is Host Information for me..Comment
-
No doubt, I'm happy to have some of my monitored items working again.
I may try converting all my items to active, I would like to know what (if any) downside there is to doing this.Comment
-
I asked this question of Alexei as well several months ago... this is the explanation he gave me on Passive vs Active:
* * *
The load generated by Zabbix Agent is extremely light regardless of what method (passive, active, mixed) is used. It would never eat more than 4-6MB of RAM and consume more than 0.1% of CPU power normally. In our test environment we have a SINGLE agent responding to 10K of hosts and processing about 400-600 queries per second on average. It works absolutely fine.
Actually active checks are more safe because they execute user parameters (custom scripts) in a sequential order, one-by-one, thus limiting a risk that you may run five of your scripts simultaneously.
Besides use of active checks off-loads Zabbix Server because it won't do resource-hungry polling and comms will be much more efficient, i.e. one way sending of performance data.Comment
-
BTW, I forget exactly what the reasoning was behind keeping one item in each template as "Passive", but I believe it had to do with host availability reporting correctly.Comment
-
This is excellent information, thanks much. I'm going to consider going all-active except for one passive check per template.Comment
-
Glad to see I'm not alone, for some reason I have this idea that going active would provide some security issue in my environment, but I can't for the life of me reason why. I'll update this item to active and see what I get, but my agents all currently have active off so I'll have to update the agent config files as well.Comment
Comment