Handy Tips #29: Discovering hosts and services with network discovery

Anonymous Anonymous

Zabbix Certified Expert & Trainer

May 12, 2022

Automate host creation and monitoring with Zabbix network discovery. Creating hosts for a large number of monitoring endpoints can become a menial and time-consuming task. It is important to provide the end-users with the tools to automate such tasks to create and start monitoring hosts based on a user-defined set of rules and conditions. Automate […]

Automate host creation and monitoring with Zabbix network discovery.

Creating hosts for a large number of monitoring endpoints can become a menial and time-consuming task. It is important to provide the end-users with the tools to automate such tasks to create and start monitoring hosts based on a user-defined set of rules and conditions.

Automate host onboarding and offboarding with Zabbix network discovery:

Discover monitoring endpoints and services in user defined IP ranges
Define a set of services that should be discovered

Provide custom workflows based on the received values
Onboard or offboard hosts based on the discovery status

Check out the video to learn how to discover your monitoring endpoints with Zabbix network discovery.

How to configure Zabbix network discovery:

Navigate to Configuration → Discovery
Press the Create discovery rule button service button
Provide the discovery rule name, IP range and update interval
Define discovery checks
Press the Add button
Navigate to Configuration → Actions → Discovery actions
Press the Create action button
Provide the action name and action conditions
Navigate to the Operations tab
Define operations to assign templates and host groups
Press the Add button
Wait for the services to be discovered
Navigate to Monitoring → Discovery and confirm the discovery status
Confirm that the hosts have been created in Zabbix

Tips and best practices

A single discovery rule will always be processed by a single Discoverer process
Every check of a service and a host generates one of the following events: Host or service – Discovered/Up/Lost/Down
The hosts discovered by different proxies are always treated as different hosts
A host is also added, even if the Add host operation is missing, if you select operations resulting in actions on a host, such as enable/disable/add to host group/link template