Collect custom metrics from your in-house applications and forward them to your Zabbix instance by utilizing the Zabbix sender command-line tool.
As you scale up our monitoring, you will inevitably encounter a situation where a particular metric can be quite complex to collect with native monitoring techniques.
Zabbix sender can use multiple methods to ingest custom metrics and forward them to your Zabbix instance:
- Send metrics to Zabbix server or Zabbix proxy
- Invoke Zabbix sender from the command-line and pass metrics to it
- Users can restrict specific item keys or define restrictions based on item key patternsZabbix sender can collect metrics from an input file
- Zabbix sender can send metrics from Windows and Linux environments
- Standard input data can be passed to Zabbix sender
Check out the video to learn how to use Zabbix sender to send custom metrics to your Zabbix instance.
How to use Zabbix sender to send custom metrics to your Zabbix instance:
- Create a new host in Configuration → Hosts
- Remember the exact host name of the new host
- Navigate to Configuration → Hosts → Your host → Items
- Press the Create item button
- Create a new item with Type Zabbix trapper
- Remember the exact item key for the new item
- Connect to your host shell via SSH
- Install the Zabbix sender package
- Invoke the Zabbix sender and send a value to the trapper item on your new host
- Navigate to Monitoring → Latest data
- Filter by the new host and the trapper item
- Observe the last received value
- The value should match the one sent from the Zabbix sender
Tips and best practices:
- The hostname and item key in the Zabbix frontend should match the host and key being passed to the Zabbix sender
- The hostname and the Zabbix server address can be passed to the sender from the Zabbix agent configuration file
- The trapper item type of information should match the data that is being sent by the Zabbix sender
- Custom timestamp can be assigned to the metric when reading it from a file
- Zabbix sender connections can be encrypted
- Preprocessing can be used to further transform the received metrics
Moreover, you can even use the zabbix_sender utility on a some platforms where a native Zabbix Agent is absent, for example IBM Power Systems (formerly known as: System i , eServer iSeries , AS /400).
You need only compatible binary from the appropriate Zabbix Agent for AIX (link).