Aggregate checks

Running individual checks has been great so far, but they are just checks on one system. What if you would like to know the total CPU load of a group of servers? For example, when you are running a cluster of servers? For this we can make use of the aggregated checks in Zabbix.

Getting ready

To be able to finish this recipe successfully we need our Zabbix server with a few Linux hosts installed and properly configured.

How to do it …

1. First, we create a new host called linuxgroup, for the agent IP address we can just put 0.0.0.0 and add it in a fictive hostgroup or for example, Discovered hosts.

2. Next, we create a new group (Configuration | Host groups) "aggregated" and we add two or more Linux hosts in this group.

3. Now we create an active item "system.cpu.load[percpu,avg1]" in a new template that we can link to all our hosts available in our "aggregated" group.

4. The next step is to create a new template for example aggregated-linux and link this template to our fake host linuxgroup...