2 Inventory

Overview

You can keep the inventory of networked devices in Zabbix.

There is a special Inventory menu in the Zabbix frontend. However, you will not see any data there initially and it is not where you enter data. Building inventory data is done manually when configuring a host or automatically by using some automatic population options.

Building inventory

Manual mode

When configuring a host, in the Host inventory tab you can enter such details as the type of device, serial number, location, responsible person, etc - data that will populate inventory information.

If a URL is included in host inventory information and it starts with 'http' or 'https', it will result in a clickable link in the Inventory section.

Automatic mode

Host inventory can also be populated automatically. For that to work, when configuring a host the inventory mode in the Host inventory tab must be set to Automatic.

Then you can configure host items to populate any host inventory field with their value, indicating the destination field with the respective attribute (called Item will populate host inventory field) in item configuration.

Items that are especially useful for automated inventory data collection:

• system.hw.chassis[full|type|vendor|model|serial] - default is [full], root permissions needed
• system.hw.cpu[all|cpunum,full|maxfreq|vendor|model|curfreq] - default is [all,full]
• system.hw.devices[pci|usb] - default is [pci]
• system.hw.macaddr[interface,short|full] - default is [all,full], interface is regexp
• system.sw.arch
• system.sw.os[name|short|full] - default is [name]
• system.sw.packages[package,manager,short|full] - default is [all,all,full], package is regexp

Inventory overview

The overview of all inventory data entered is available in the Inventory menu.

In Inventory → Overview you can group the display of available data by various fields of the inventory.

In Inventory → Hosts you can see all hosts that have inventory information. Clicking on the host name will reveal all the details in a form.

Inventory macros

There are host inventory macros {INVENTORY.*} available for use in notifications, for example:

"Server in {INVENTORY.LOCATION1} has a problem, responsible person is {INVENTORY.CONTACT1}, phone number {INVENTORY.POC.PRIMARY.PHONE.A1}."

For more details, see the Macros supported by location page.