Zabbix offers automatic network discovery functionality that is effective and very flexible.
With network discovery properly set up you can:
Zabbix network discovery is based on the following information:
It does NOT provide:
Network discovery basically consists of two phases: discovery and actions.
Zabbix periodically scans the IP ranges defined in network discovery rules. The frequency of the check is configurable for each rule individually.
Note that one discovery rule will always be processed by a single discoverer process. The IP range will not be split between multiple discoverer processes.
Each rule has a set of service checks defined to be performed for the IP range.
Discovery checks are processed independently from the other checks. If any checks do not find a service (or fail), other checks will still be processed.
Every check of a service and a host (IP) performed by the network discovery module generates a discovery event.
Event | Check of service result |
---|---|
Service Discovered | The service is 'up' after it was 'down' or when discovered for the first time. |
Service Up | The service is 'up', consecutively. |
Service Lost | The service is 'down' after it was 'up'. |
Service Down | The service is 'down', consecutively. |
Host Discovered | At least one service of a host is 'up' after all services of that host were 'down'. |
Host Up | At least one service of a host is 'up', consecutively. |
Host Lost | All services of a host are 'down' after at least one was 'up'. |
Host Down | All services of a host are 'down', consecutively. |
Discovery events can be the basis of relevant actions, such as:
These actions can be configured with respect to the device type, IP, status, uptime/downtime, etc. For full details on configuring actions for network-discovery based events, see action operation and conditions pages.
A host is added if the Add host operation is selected. A host is also added, even if the Add host operation is missing, if you select operations resulting in actions on a host. Such operations are:
When adding hosts, a host name is the result of reverse DNS lookup or IP address if reverse lookup fails. Lookup is performed from the Zabbix server or Zabbix proxy, depending on which is doing the discovery. If lookup fails on the proxy, it is not retried on the server. If the host with such a name already exists, the next host would get _2 appended to the name, then _3 and so on.
Created hosts are added to the Discovered hosts group (by default, configurable in Administration → General → Other). If you wish hosts to be added to another group, add a Remove from host groups operation (specifying "Discovered hosts") and also add an Add to host groups operation (specifying another host group), because a host must belong to a host group.
If a host already exists with the discovered IP address, a new host is not created. However, if the discovery action contains operations (link template, add to host group, etc), they are performed on the existing host.
Since Zabbix 2.4.0, hosts created by a network discovery rule are deleted automatically if a discovered entity is not in the rule's IP range any more. Hosts are deleted immediately.
When hosts are added as a result of network discovery, they get interfaces created according to these rules: