6 Sender

Overview

Zabbix sender is a command line utility that may be used to send performance data to Zabbix server for processing.

The utility is usually used in long running user scripts for periodical sending of availability and performance data.

For sending results directly to Zabbix server or proxy, a trapper item type must be configured.

Running Zabbix sender

An example of running Zabbix UNIX sender:

shell> cd bin
       shell> ./zabbix_sender -z zabbix -s "Linux DB3" -k db.connections -o 43

where:

• z - Zabbix server host (IP address can be used as well)
• s - technical name of monitored host (as registered in Zabbix frontend)
• k - item key
• o - value to send

Zabbix sender can be used to send multiple values from an input file. See the Zabbix sender manpage for more information.

Zabbix sender accepts strings in UTF-8 encoding (for both UNIX-like systems and Windows) without byte order mark (BOM) first in the file.

Zabbix sender on Windows can be run similarly:

zabbix_sender.exe [options]

Since Zabbix 1.8.4, zabbix_sender realtime sending scenarios have been improved to gather multiple values passed to it in close succession and send them to the server in a single connection. A value that is not further apart from the previous value than 0.2 seconds can be put in the same stack, but maximum pooling time still is 1 second.

If sending many values from an input file, Zabbix sender will batch them at 250 values in one go (all values will be processed), for example:

# zabbix_sender -z 127.0.0.1 -i /tmp/traptest.txt 
       Info from server: "Processed 250 Failed 0 Total 250 Seconds spent 0.002668"
       Info from server: "Processed 50 Failed 0 Total 50 Seconds spent 0.000540"
       sent: 300; skipped: 0; total: 300

All entries from an input file are sent in a sequential order top-down.

If the target item has triggers referencing it, all timestamps in an input file must be in an increasing order, otherwise event calculation will not be correct.