Handy Tips #13: Automate inventory information collection with Zabbix

Anonymous Anonymous

Zabbix Certified Expert & Trainer

November 24, 2021

Metrics collected by Zabbix can be used not only for historic data analysis and problem detection but they can also be utilized to populate your host inventory. Keeping track of your host inventory is a necessity in organizations of every size. Using another tool to do that can be costly and cause software bloat and […]

Metrics collected by Zabbix can be used not only for historic data analysis and problem detection but they can also be utilized to populate your host inventory.

Keeping track of your host inventory is a necessity in organizations of every size. Using another tool to do that can be costly and cause software bloat and sometimes we may have to resort to populating inventory data manually.

With Zabbix we can utilize our collected metrics and automatically populate our host inventory with them:

Collected metrics can be used to populate an inventory field
Automated inventory data collection can be mixed with manual inventory input

Group and do a count up of hosts based on their inventory values
Provide inventory information in your alert messages

Check out the video to learn how to automate inventory collection and present it in multiple views.

How to automate inventory collection and display inventory data:

Navigate to Configuration → Templates
Open the Linux by Zabbix agent template
Open the item Version of Zabbix agent running
In the Populates Host inventory field section select Software Application A
Navigate to Configuration → Hosts
Filter to find your Linux hosts
Press the Mass Update button
Link the Linux by Zabbix agent in Templates → Link templates
Select Automatic Inventory mode under the Inventory tab
Press the Update button
Wait for the metrics to get collected from your hosts
Navigate to Inventory → Overview and Group hosts by Software Application A
Click on the Host Count number
Click on one of the hosts
Click on the Details tab to observe the individual host details

Tips and best practices:

Every type of item can be used to populate an inventory field
Inventory fields populated by an item will be updated once a new value is collected by Zabbix
All data types, except Log, can be used to populate an inventory field
A single item can populate only a single inventory field
Inventory macros like {INVENTORY.*} can be used in alert messages