Failed to execute command "rpm -qa": Timeout while executing a shell script

[andreaf-it]

Hello,
receive this two errors on my zabbix proxy.

Failed to execute command "rpm -qa": Timeout while executing a shell script.
active check "system.sw.packages" is not supported: Cannot obtain package information.

The situation is centos proxy 4.4
Server linux 4.4
The proxy has installed also zabbix active agent

[dimir]

Looks like rpm -qa command (that is executed when item system.sw.packages is processed) on the agent is run for over timeout (3 seconds by default). You could connect to the agent host and run it manually:

$ time rpm -qa

You could increase a Timeout configuration parameter of the agent.

[andreaf-it]

Hi Dimir, manually seems to run properly, could you tell me the name of right parameter to change? and what time do you advice to set?
Thank you
Andrea

[dimir]

Could you show the output of

$ time rpm -qa | tail

The parameter is called Timeout and you should find it in /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf . The value depends, but let's first see the output.

[andreaf-it]

real 0m2.846s
user 0m2.465s
sys 0m0.387s

[dimir]

So, as you can see in your case this simple command takes almost 3 seconds to run. You could increase the Timeout value but I'd first try to find out what is causing the long run. Is there something overloading the CPU of the box? In my case even inside a docker container this command takes 0.3 seconds.