Gathering items as raw data
One of the most important features that sets Zabbix apart from most other monitoring solutions is that its main mode of interaction with the monitored objects is focused on gathering raw data as opposed to alerts or status updates. In other words, many monitoring applications have the workflow (or variation) as shown in the following diagram:
That is, an agent or any other monitoring probe is asked to not only take a measurement, but also incorporate a kind of status decision about the said measurement before sending it to the main server's component for further processing.
On the other hand, the basic Zabbix workflow is subtly, but crucially, different, as shown in the following diagram:
Here, an agent or monitoring probe is tasked with just the measurement part, and then it sends the said measurement to the server component for storage and eventually for further processing.
The data is not associated with a specific trigger decision (pass/fail, ok/warning...