Having set up passive and active Zabbix agent items, simple checks such as ICMP ping or TCP service checks, or SNMP and IPMI checks, can we go further? Of course we can. Zabbix provides several more item types that are useful in different situations—let's try them out.

In this chapter, we'll explore log file monitoring; computing values on the server from the already collected data; running custom scripts on the Zabbix server or agents; sending in complete custom data using a wonderful utility, zabbix_sender; and running commands over SSH and Telnet. Among these methods, we should be able to implement the monitoring of any custom data source that isn't supported by Zabbix out of the box.

Let's have a short overview of the topics that we'll touch on:

• Log file monitoring
• Event tags
• Reusing data on the server
• External checks
• User parameters
• SSH and Telnet items
• Dependent items and value preprocessing