The active agent auto-registration

Starting with Zabbix 2.0, it is possible to instruct the active Zabbix agent for auto-registration. This way, new hosts can be added for monitoring without configuring them manually on the server. The auto-registration of an unknown host can be triggered when an active agent asks for checks. This feature can be precious to implement an automatic monitoring of new cloud nodes. When a new node in the cloud comes up, Zabbix will automatically start collecting performance metrics and checking the availability of the host.

The active agent auto-registration can also monitor hosts that have passive checks. When the active agent asks for checks, provide them to the Zabbix server's ListenIP and ListenPort configuration parameters defined in the agent configuration file.

Note

Please note that if you have multiple IP addresses specified, only the first one will be sent to the server.

On the server side, Zabbix uses the IP and port that has been received by the agent.

Note

Here, in the event that the IP address has been delivered, Zabbix will use the IP address seen during the incoming connection. Also, if the port value is not delivered, Zabbix uses port 10050.

Configuring the auto-registration

Let's see how we can configure this feature; we will look first at the agent side. On the agent side, you need to have the Server parameter specified within the agent configuration file. Then, if you've specified even the Hostname parameter in zabbix_agentd.conf, the server will use it to register the new monitored host; otherwise, Zabbix will use the physical hostname.

On the server side, we need to configure an action, select Configuration | Actions, select Auto registration as the event source, and then click on Create action. In the screenshot that follows, we've created an action named Active auto-registration:

Configuring the auto-registration

The real-case scenario

Here, you can play as much as you want with automation. If the hosts that will be auto-registering are supposed to be only supported for active monitoring (for instance, hosts that are behind a firewall), then it is worth creating a specific template and linking it to the new hosts. Let's see how we can play with auto-registration.

Here, to customize properly and automate the host configuration, we can define HostMetadata and HostMetadataItem on the agent side. A good example to understand this automation can be the following scenario—we would like to link Template OS Linux to all the auto-registered Linux hosts.

To do this, we need to add the following value to the /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf agent configuration file:

HostMetadataItem=system.uname

Then, in our real-world scenario, HostMetadataItem will contain:

Linux servername.example.com 2.6.32-504.16.2.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Apr 22 06:48:29 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Then, on the frontend, our action will be configured as follows:

The real-case scenario

With Conditions such as Host metadata like Linux, the Operations tab will contain the elements shown in the following screenshot:

The real-case scenario

As you can see, once all the Conditions of the relative tab are satisfied, the Operation tab will link the host to Template OS Linux.

Now, as you can see, if we package the agent with the configuration file premade, we can heavily reduce the startup time of new hosts.

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