I never noticed this before since I didn’t use Zabbix for production monitoring, but Zabbix out of the box does not have any alerts set up to tell you that an SNMP agent is unresponsive.
This isn’t an issue if you’re doing monitoring using the Zabbix Agent, or just monitoring server ups and downs, but when you’re using Zabbix to gather metrics such as CPU and Memory usage, this can become an issue.
The solution is to create a trigger for SNMP hosts to alert when Zabbix does not get any data for more than a certain amount of time.
Creating the trigger
I’ve chosen to create the trigger on the Template SNMP Generic
template so that all SNMP devices will get this trigger.
To create the trigger, click on Configuration ==> Templates
, and then find Template SNMP Generic
. To the right, click on Triggers
Once the Triggers page has loaded, click on Create Trigger
in the top right.
Give the trigger a name, and use the following Expression {Template SNMP Generic:sysUpTime.nodata(5m)}=1
Optionally, give it a Description, and then set the Severity
of the alert that you want to generate, and then click on Add.
The trigger should then apply to any devices that are linked to the Template SNMP Generic
template.