This page walks you through the steps required to start basic monitoring of your network traffic with Zabbix using active checks.
Who this guide is for
This guide is designed for new Zabbix users and contains the minimum set of steps required to enable basic monitoring of your network traffic using active checks. If you are looking for deep customization options or require more advanced configuration, see the Configuration section of Zabbix manual.
Prerequisites
Before proceeding with this guide, you need to download and install Zabbix server, Zabbix frontend and Zabbix agent according to the instructions for your OS. As a starting point, the Installation from packages, followed by the Web interface installation, would be the advised solution. Note that you should install Zabbix agent on the machine that requires traffic monitoring. This can be either the same host where Zabbix server is installed or a different host.
This guide will provide the instructions on configuring the network traffic monitoring of eth0 interface on a separate machine named Remote host.
Zabbix agent can collect metrics in active or passive mode (simultaneously). See Passive and active agent checks for more info. In this guide, monitoring by means of active checks will be described.
1. Open the agent configuration file on the machine where the agent is installed (by default, the path is /usr/local/etc/zabbix_agentd.conf):
2. Add the IP address or DNS name of your Zabbix server to the ServerActive parameter. For example:
3. Define the Hostname parameter - it must match the host name defined in Zabbix frontend. In our example, it is:
4. Restart Zabbix agent:
1. Log into Zabbix frontend.
2. Create a host in Zabbix web interface, specifying the IP address or DNS name of the machine on which the agent is installed.
Make sure the field Host name matches the Hostname parameter defined in the agent configuration file.
Follow the instructions on creating an item to add the items for traffic monitoring, namely:
A simple setup for the incoming traffic monitoring item with an active check would look as follows:
To make the collected data suitable for practical use, you can set some preprocessing steps when creating the items. In the given case, those can be multiplication by 8 (to convert bytes to bits) and presentation as change per second.
Congratulations! At this point, Zabbix is already monitoring your network traffic.
To view collected metrics, open the Monitoring → Hosts menu section and click on the Latest data in the row of the host.
You will see the traffic data.
See also: