Active agents

Hope you recollect what we discussed in Chapter 1, Agent installation and configuration. We talked about active and passive agent configurations. In this topic, we will explain a bit more in depth the active agent setup in Zabbix. Remember when we create items in Zabbix, we can create Zabbix items as passive and active.

Getting ready

You will need a Zabbix server and you must have the software for the agent installed on the machine that you would like to monitor. This can be the Zabbix server or another machine. The agent needs no configuration. We will explain you how to go about the same in this recipe.

How to do it ...

1. The first thing we do is make sure that our agent has the proper configuration setup to work as an active agent. Make sure that in the zabbix_agentd.conf file the ServerActive option is set and points to the Zabbix server.
2. Make sure that our server can be reached on port 10051. Verify that the port is open in the firewall!
3. Next in the agent configuration file we...