old entries still exist in the DB

[nicolasg]

Hi,

Having a look at Zabbix servers logs I can see references to very old servers and groups that doesn't exist anymore , they have been removed from the Zabbix frontend configuration :

20141103:155456.164 item "vp2.stg.example.net:grpavg["EU-West_POP","system.cpu.load[,avg1]","last","0"]" became not supported: No items for key "system.cpu.load[,avg1]" in group(s) "EU-West_Group".
13731:20141103:155456.164 item "vp5.eu-west.example.net:grpavg["EU-Wes_Group","system.swap.size[,free]","last","0"]" became not supported: No items for key "system.swap.size[,free]" in group(s) "EU-West_Group".
13713:20141103:155456.738 cannot send list of active checks to [10.123.136.159]: host [ip-10-123-137-150.ec2.internal] not found
13714:20141103:155456.762 cannot send list of active checks to [10.136.52.240]: host [ip-10-126-50-230.ec2.internal

This also seems to be the reason why our DB size has increased over time when the number of nodes we are monitoring has decreased.

Does anyone knows how can I delete these very old invalid references once for all ?

Regards,
N.

[kustodian]

If you don't see them in the frontend, you can only delete them directly from the database. There is a table hosts which should automatically delete items when a row is deleted. I'm not sure if you would need to restart zabbix server after you delete the hosts from the database, but please test this first on a test maching by importing the database (you can skip history* and trends* tables for testing this, since they are not important).

[nicolasg]

Thanks for the reply kustodian.

Shouldn't that be something to be done by the Zabbix server through the housekeeping process automatically ?

Does that mean every time I delete a host on the front end I'll have to manually delete the host from the DB as well?

[kustodian]

As far as I now, deleting a host from the frontend is done by the frontend itself, housekeeper only deletes history/trends later for hosts which were deleted. This is the reason I think you won't even have to restart zabbix server, but please check that.

Of course if you partitioned history/trends, housekeeper should be disabled for them, but this is not relevant for this discussion.

EDIT: Also the active checks error is normal, since the zabbix agent on the host you deleted periodically asks zabbix server if it has any new items to send to the server. I would recommend that you stop the agent on deleted hosts.

EDIT2: The easiest way to check if the deleted host still exists in the database is this:

SELECT * from hosts where host = 'deleted_host_name';