Who doesn’t like to automate tasks when this is easy and can save a lot of time/troubles. When you are just starting with Zabbix, it seems that the only thing you can automate is installing the components with rpm/deb packages on the servers/clients. After installation of the packages, you’ll still need to create the host in the web interface which takes some time (And boring to if you have a lot of hosts to configure..). There is an possibility to use (auto) discovery rules, but this requires some configuration in the web interface and this only works once when the host isn’t configured in the web interface (Initial setup only).

Luckily, the Zabbix has an API which can be used for some tasks that can be automated, like creating hosts! The wdijkerman-zabbix module can use this API for the following tasks:

• Create host
• Update host with Templates

There is an requirement when you want to do this: Puppet Master needs the PuppetDB configured. If you want to configure an PuppetDB, please use Google for this as I won’t discuss this here.

Idea

class { 'zabbix':
  zabbix_url       => 'zabbix.example.com',
  manage_resources => true,
}

This is an very basic configuration method mentioned above which will automatically configure the hosts in the web interface when a new “zabbix-agent” is installed. You don’t have to do anything else (yes ok, you’ll have to run some puppet runs on several machines. :-).)

This assumes that the password for the “Admin” user is still “zabbix”. You can override this of course, just like the database credentials which are default set to “zabbix-server”. (Don’t forget to change it to something non default 😉 )

Userparameters

There is an other nice feature in the “wdijkerman-zabbix” module which uses the Zabbix API. The “zabbix::userparameters” define can make use of the API. The goal for this define is installing an UserParameters file in the zabbix-agent includedir. This file consists of 1 or more UserParameter entries which explains what commands needs to be executed for an key.

An example:

zabbix::userparameters { 'Exim':
 content => 'UserParameter=exim.mailq,sudo /usr/sbin/exim -bpc',
}

There is an item in a template which executes the “sudo /usr/sbin/exim -pbc” command with the “exim.mailq” key. When the above 3 lines are in the exim puppet module and this module installs the UserParameter file, you still need to update the host in the web interface to make sure the “Template Exim” is assigned.

But stop, we can use it like the following now:

zabbix::userparameters { 'Exim':
 content  => 'UserParameter=exim.mailq,sudo /usr/sbin/exim -bpc',
 template => 'Template Exim',
}