External checks

Just when you thought things couldn't get any better, you notice that Zabbix has support for external checks. This means that Zabbix will run a script or a binary from a specific location, without the need of any agent running on the host that we want to monitor.

Getting ready

For this setup, we need our Zabbix server with a host that can be reached by the Zabbix server. There is no need to install a Zabbix agent on the host as we will make use of our own scripts to run some checks.

How to do it …

1. Creating external checks is very easy in Zabbix. First thing we need to verify is where to put them on our Zabbix server. This can be done by looking in the configuration file of the Zabbix server in the zabbix_server.conf file. Here we see the option ExternalScripts where we can specify the location or use the standard one:

   ExternalScripts=/usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts

2. In this location, we will place our script. For example we could check the number of cores available on our host....