Chapter 4. Discovering Your Network

In the previous chapters, we've seen how to get different metrics from quite a few different sources, using different methods. What we haven't covered yet, is how to easily get all this data into Zabbix when you have a great number of monitored objects.

Manually creating hosts, items, and triggers is an excellent exercise to get the hang of how things work in Zabbix, but it can quickly become a repetitive, boring, error-prone activity. In other words, they are the kinds of tasks computers were made for in the first place.

What if your monitoring solution could just find the hosts and devices you want to monitor, add them as Zabbix hosts, apply a template, and start monitoring them? And what if it didn't just limit itself to finding hosts to monitor, but it also found out whether your switch has 24 or 48 ports, how many disks your web server has attached, and what ports are open on a certain host? After some initial configuration...