Zabbix Agent

A native Zabbix agent, developed in C language, may run on various supported platforms, including Linux, UNIX and Windows, and collect data such as CPU, memory, disk and network interface usage from a device.

Zabbix Agents

Small footprint and low resource

Due to its small footprint, the agent can be run on devices with limited resources.

The monitoring configurations are centralized in Zabbix server, making it easier to manage the Zabbix agent, which can use a single configuration file on all servers.

A Zabbix agent running under Linux:
Zabbix Agent usage - Linux
A Zabbix agent running under MS Windows:
Zabbix Agent usage - Windows

Polling and trapping support

Zabbix agents support both passive (polling) and active checks (trapping). Zabbix may perform checks based on an interval, however, it is also possible to schedule specific times for item polling.

Passive checks (polling):

  • Zabbix server (or proxy) requests a value from Zabbix agent
  • Agent processes the request and returns the value to Zabbix server (or proxy)

Active checks (trapping):

  • Zabbix agent requests from Zabbix server (or proxy) a list of active checks
  • Agent sends the results in periodically

Agent functions

The following list of checks is supported by Zabbix agent out of the box.

Network
  • Packets/bytes transferred
  • Errors/dropped packets
  • Collisions
CPU
  • Load average
  • CPU idle/usage
  • CPU utilization data per individual process
Memory
  • Free/used memory
  • Swap/pagefile utilization
Disk
  • Space free/used
  • Read and write I/O
Service
  • Process status
  • Process memory usage
  • Service status (ssh, ntp, ldap, smtp, ftp, http, pop, nntp, imap)
  • Windows service status
  • DNS resolution
  • TCP connectivity
  • TCP response time
File
  • File size/time
  • File exists
  • Checksum
  • MD5 hash
  • RegExp search
Log
  • Text log
  • Windows eventlog
Other
  • System uptime
  • System time
  • Users connected
  • Performance counter (Windows)

See full list of supported checks.

Extending Zabbix agent

Zabbix agent functionality can be extended using the following methods:

Log monitoring

Support for monitoring text logs and the Windows Event Log is a native function of Zabbix agent, including support for rotation.

It is possible to graph data from log items, when specific-content extraction capabilities are used.

The logs are constantly analyzed by Zabbix agent and when a defined search item is found, Zabbix server is notified and may even take some action or automatically send a notification to a user or group.

WMI support

Zabbix agent features native Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) support, enhancing the ability to easily obtain and monitor real-time system information and performance metrics from Windows servers and workstations.

WMI queries can be performed with wmi.get[] key to retrieve a single string, integer or floating point property from the specified WMI namespace class.

For more information about Windows Management Instrumentation, available classes and their properties see MSDN documentation.

IPv6 ready

Zabbix agent supports IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

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