Passive agents
by Andrea Vacche, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Rihards Olups
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Table of Contents
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Credits
- Preface
- I. Module 1
- 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
- The first steps in monitoring
- Zabbix features and architecture
- Installation
- Summary
- 2. Getting Your First Notification
- 3. Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols
- 4. Monitoring SNMP Devices
- 5. Managing Hosts, Users, and Permissions
- 6. Detecting Problems with Triggers
- 7. Acting upon Monitored Conditions
- 8. Simplifying Complex Configurations with Templates
- 9. Visualizing Data with Graphs and Maps
- 10. Visualizing Data with Screens and Slideshows
- 11. Advanced Item Monitoring
- 12. Automating Configuration
- 13. Monitoring Web Pages
- 14. Monitoring Windows
- 15. High-Level Business Service Monitoring
- 16. Monitoring IPMI Devices
- 17. Monitoring Java Applications
- 18. Monitoring VMware
- 19. Using Proxies to Monitor Remote Locations
- 20. Encrypting Zabbix Traffic
- 21. Working Closely with Data
- 22. Zabbix Maintenance
- A. Troubleshooting
- B. Being Part of the Community
- 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
- II. Module 2
- 1. Zabbix Configuration
- 2. Getting Around in Zabbix
- 3. Groups, Users, and Permissions
- 4. Monitoring with Zabbix
- Introduction
- Active agents
- Passive agents
- Extending agents
- SNMP checks
- Internal checks
- Zabbix trapper
- IPMI checks
- JMX checks
- Aggregate checks
- External checks
- Database monitoring
- Checks with SSH
- Checks with Telnet
- Calculated checks
- Building web scenarios
- Monitoring web scenarios
- Some advanced monitoring tricks
- Autoinventory
- 5. Testing with Triggers in Zabbix
- 6. Working with Templates
- 7. Data Visualization and Reporting in Zabbix
- 8. Monitoring VMware and Proxies
- 9. Autodiscovery
- 10. Zabbix Maintenance and API
- C. Upgrading and Troubleshooting Zabbix
- III. Module 3
- 1. Deploying Zabbix
- 2. Distributed Monitoring
- 3. High Availability and Failover
- Understanding high availability
- Understanding the levels of IT service
- Some considerations about high availability
- Implementing high availability on a web server
- Configuring the Zabbix server for high availability
- Implementing high availability for a database
- Summary
- 4. Collecting Data
- 5. Visualizing Data
- 6. Managing Alerts
- 7. Managing Templates
- 8. Handling External Scripts
- 9. Extending Zabbix
- 10. Integrating Zabbix
- D. Bibliography
- Index
In this topic, we will show you how to setup your agent as a passive agent only. We will see how to create a passive item for our agent and have a look at how the communication works with our Zabbix server.
For this recipe to work, you need your Zabbix server and the standard login account admin or another super administration account. We also need a host with the agent installed. This can be on another host or on our Zabbix server. There is no need to configure the host configuration file yet.
- The first thing we do is make sure that our agent has the proper configuration setup to work as a passive agent. Make sure that in the
zabbix_agentd.conffile theServerActiveoption is not set and that the optionServeris set and points to the Zabbix server. - Remember that the hostname is only for the active agent, so we don't need to define this parameter.
- Restart the Zabbix agent (
service zabbix-agent restartor RHEL 7 users runsystemctl restart zabbix-agent.service). - You are now ready to add a passive item on your host, go to Configuration | Hosts | Items | Create item.
Passive checks are really simple in the way that the server or proxy will ask the agent for some data such as CPU load, disk space, and so on. The Zabbix agent will then give the requested data back to the Zabbix server or proxy:
Same as with the active agent, we can add more than one IP address as server or proxy in our passive agent's configuration file. To do this we also add a list of comma-separated IP addresses or hostnames.
Note
As you can see, there is more communication between the passive agent and the server than with the active agent and the server. This means that more sockets will be opened on the server side. So in a large setup, you could possibly run out of sockets if you have a lot of passive agents running without a proxy. Also, the passive agent has no buffer such as the active agent.
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