Monitoring hosts through a proxy
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
After setting up a proxy, we want to add some hosts to our proxy. In this recipe, we will show you how to link your hosts to the installed proxies.
For this recipe, we need our Zabbix server with an active or passive proxy configured like we have done in one of the previous recipes. We also need a host that we can use to connect to our proxy.
Adding a host to a proxy is a very straightforward method and doesn't take much time:
- First we have to change the
Serverand/orActiveServervalues in the configuration of our Zabbix client. This can be done in thezabbix_agentd.confconfiguration file. Instead of the Zabbix server's IP we add the IP of our proxy. - Restart the agent:
service zabbix-proxy restart - In the Zabbix server, go to the agent in the menu Configuration | Hosts. Select the correct host and at the bottom of the host page, select from Monitored by proxy the correct proxy from the list.
- Now, go to Administration | Proxies. You will see that the Host count and Item count has increased.
The proxy will also show the number of items and the required Virtual Private Server (VPS).
As we have seen in our schemas, once a proxy is in place, the host(s) will only communicate with the proxy once the host is configured correctly. From that moment, the proxy will act as Zabbix server so everything that was done from the Zabbix server will be done from the proxy from now on. So if we want to monitor for example, IPMI, we will have to install the correct libraries on our proxy. If we want to run external scripts, then we need to install them on the proxy instead of the Zabbix server.
Triggers are always evaluated by Zabbix server. The proxy will only collect the data and give it to the Zabbix server. It is very important once you set up proxies that you make use of the NTP server so that the time between Zabbix server, proxies, and hosts is always OK!
Don't forget that the ProxyConfigFrequency=3600 option is standard. That means, that if you change something on the proxy, the proxy will only be notified of those changes after 3600 seconds. The next command example will reload the configuration cache so that the active proxy will ask the server for the latest configuration:
zabbix_proxy -c /etc/zabbix/zabbix_proxy.conf -R config_cache_reload
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