Handy Tips #15: Deploying Zabbix passive and active agents

Anonymous Anonymous

Zabbix Certified Expert & Trainer

December 9, 2021

Deploy Zabbix Agent to collect OS-level metrics. There are multiple approaches to collecting OS-level metrics – from collecting only simple ping statistics to deploying an SNMP agent or using custom scripts. In many cases, this is either not sufficient or too time-consuming and not flexible enough. By deploying the Zabbix Agent you can enable a […]

Deploy Zabbix Agent to collect OS-level metrics.

There are multiple approaches to collecting OS-level metrics – from collecting only simple ping statistics to deploying an SNMP agent or using custom scripts. In many cases, this is either not sufficient or too time-consuming and not flexible enough. By deploying the Zabbix Agent you can enable a quick and easy way to collect OS-level metrics.

Deploy Zabbix Agent and collect metrics by polling the agent or autonomously sending data to your Zabbix Server:

Zabbix Agent supports polling (passive) and trapping (active)
Negligible performance overhead
Can be installed from packages on Linux or the MSI installer on Windows

Supports the most popular Unix-like operating systems
Zabbix Agent can be extended with custom User Parameters

Check out the video to learn how to deploy the Zabbix Agent in passive and active modes

How to configure and deploy Zabbix passive and active agents:

Install the Zabbix repository and the Zabbix Agent on your host
Open the zabbix_agentd.conf configuration file
Specify your Zabbix Server address in the Server and ServerActive parameters
Define the name of your host in the Hostname parameter
Restart the Zabbix Agent
Navigate to Configuration → Hosts
Create two hosts in Zabbix frontend – one for passive and one for active checks
For passive Agent host – define an Agent interface containing the address of your Zabbix Server
The active agent Host name should match the Hostname parameter value in the Agent configuration file
Apply the corresponding Linux by Zabbix Agent/Linux by Zabbix Agent active template
Navigate to Monitoring → Latest data and check if you have received metrics from the hosts

Tips and best practices:

A single Zabbix Agent can collect metrics in both passive and active modes
Zabbix Agent is backward compatible
The frontend ZBX interface icon is related only to passive checks
Active Zabbix Agent doesn’t require an interface configuration in Zabbix frontend
For active checks, the Zabbix Agent Hostname in the configuration file must match the Host name in the frontend