This chapter concludes the central part of the book, which is dedicated to developing a deeper understanding of the Zabbix monitoring system's core functions. The effective configuration and use of templates build on all the knowledge gained from using and analyzing items, graphs and screens, triggers, and actions. To this knowledge, this chapter has added a few template-specific aspects that should help to tie all of the previous chapters together. From choosing what to monitor and how to configure different item types, to putting together information-rich visualization items, at this point in the book, you can perform all the tasks associated with implementing and managing a monitoring system. You should also be able to select the triggers and actions that are most significant in order to maximize the expressiveness of your alerts, while avoiding false positives. Finally, you should not have any problems bringing it all together through the use of macros and nested and combined templates in order to apply a consistent and meaningful configuration to a wide range of hosts and to further automate these operations through host-level discovery actions and the low-level discovery facilities of Zabbix's templates.

The final part of the book will be about further customization options for Zabbix, how to extend its functionality, and how to really integrate it with the rest of your IT management systems in order to bring out its full power.

The next chapter will focus on writing extension scripts for Zabbix and its monitoring protocol.