Exporting data

Besides directly manipulating and monitoring internal objects, another compelling use of the Zabbix API is to extract data for further analysis outside of the Zabbix frontend. Maps, screens, graphs, triggers, and history tables can be excellent reporting tools, but they are all meant to be used inside the frontend. Sometimes, you may need the raw data in order to perform custom calculations on it—especially when it comes to capacity planning—or you may need to produce a document with a few custom graphs and other data. If you find yourself with such needs on a regular basis, it makes sense to write some code and extract your data through the API. An interesting feature of the get methods, which are the fundamental building blocks of any data extraction code, is that they come with quite a few filters and options out of the box. If you are willing to spend some time studying them, you'll find that you are able to keep your code small and clean as you won...