Understanding Zabbix hosts

One of Zabbix's great strengths is its flexibility when it comes to organizing monitoring data. Even without considering its powerful templating and discovery features, which will be covered in Chapter 4, Discovering Your Network, there is a lot that you can do with standard hosts, items, and triggers. Here are a few tips on how you can use them effectively.

Hosts and host groups

Zabbix hosts usually represent a single, specific box or appliance in your network. They can also be a part of one or more host groups.

Host groups are very useful as they make it easy to navigate Zabbix's interface, separating hosts into categories and allowing you to organize and manage a huge amount of appliances without having to deal with impossibly long lists of hostnames. The same host can be part of different host groups, and this can be very useful as you might want, for example, to have a group for all your routers, a group for all your switches, and a group for every...