Monitoring Agentless Servers on Zabbix Server through ICMP Ping

Last Updated on December 31, 2022 by Thiago Crepaldi

From previous posts, we have deployed Zabbix Server on a Proxmox container. We also hardened the installation through Let’s Encrypt certificates for the web frontend and TLS encryption for the communication between Server and Agents/Proxies, after all, although encrypted Zabbix Server <-> Agent/Proxy communication with PSK or SSL certificates 🙂

In this post I will cover how to monitor a Server through ICMP Pings using Zabbix Agent template. Templates are great because they already pack a bunch of monitoring items, actions, triggers, etc that we would have to add one by one otherwise. Using template is smart because when we need to make changes, we just do it in the template and all hosts that use them will see the new settings. On a manual setup, you would have to make the change in each host, one by one…

Configuring Zabbix Server through Web UI

Although this is an agentless setup, meaning that you will not install Zabbix Agent on the target machine, we still need to create a Host on the Zabbix Server to hold the configurations, such as IP/DNS Name.

Go to Configuration >> Hosts and click on Create Host button. When the configuration dialog open, the Host tab should be the default one. Fill in the following fields and leave the rest as-is:

• Host
  • Host name: Type the server hostname
  • Templates: ICMP Ping
  • Host Groups: Linux Servers or Application or whatever describes your Agent
  • Interfaces:
    • Add a new interface
      • Type: Agent
      • IP Address: Type the server IP to be ping’ed
      • DNS Name: Type the server FQDN to be ping’ed
      • Connect to: Select IP or DNS
      • Port: 10050
      • Description: Do your thing here
      • Monitored by Proxy: (no proxy)

Finish the host creation by clicking Update.

That is it. There is no other configuration 🙂

Go to Monitoring >> Latest data. In the filter section, type the name of your server in the Hosts box and finally hit Apply. A list of items should be displayed for it, such as ICMP loss, ICMP ping and ICMP response time

That is it, have fun!