Let's have a look how we can use Zabbix to manage our inventory:

1. Go to Configuration | Hosts, and make sure Linux servers has been selected in the Group drop-down. Then, click on A test host, and switch to the Host inventory tab. By default, the inventory is set to Disabled, as shown in the following screenshot:

2. Click on Manual to enable the inventory fields. Notice how there are a lot of fields, starting with simple things such as type, name, operating system, and hardware, and ending with hardware maintenance dates, location data, and point-of-contact information. In the Type field, enter test, and then click on Update.
3. Now, click on Another host, switch to the Host inventory tab, and click on Manual. Then, enter the same test string in the Type field again. Click on Update. Now, let's mark the checkboxes next to both SNMP hosts and click on Mass update at the bottom of the list. In the Mass update form, switch to the Inventory tab and mark the checkbox next to Inventory mode. Switch to Manual, mark the checkbox next to Type, and enter snmp in that field:

4. Click on Update. With some inventory data populated, let's go to Inventory | Overview. Choose all from the Group drop-down and Type from the Grouping by drop-down. Notice how we can see all the available values for this field and how many hosts we have for each of them:

5. Click on the number 2 in the Host count column next to snmp. Here, we can see individual hosts and some of the inventory fields, including the field that we used, Type. This list was filtered to show only those hosts that have the exact snmp string in the Type field. You can verify that by looking at the filter:

6. Collapse the filter and click on SNMP Device in the Hosts column. This will open the host overview page, displaying some basic configuration information. Notably, host interfaces are displayed here. While users without configuration permissions on hosts are not able to open host properties in the configuration section, they may see this host overview page and see the host interfaces this way:

7. There are also two lines of links at the bottom of this form—Monitoring and Configuration. As you might expect, they provide quick access to various monitoring and configuration sections for this host, similar to the global search we discussed in Chapter 2, Getting Your First Notification. Clicking on hostname SNMP Device will provide access to global scripts. We will explore and configure those in Chapter 7, Acting upon Monitored Conditions.
8. Let's return to Configuration | Hosts and click on SNMP Device. Switch to the Host inventory tab, and in the OS column, enter Linux (http://www.kernel.org) and click on Update. Let's go directly to Inventory | Hosts this time—notice how this was the page we ended up at when we clicked on the host count from the inventory overview. Looking at the OS column, we can see that Zabbix recognized the URL and made it clickable:

This allows you to link to websites that provide more information or to web management interfaces for various devices. Note that, other than recognizing URLs, fields are not interpreted in any way; for example, Location latitude and Location longitude fields are just text fields.