Chapter 7. Managing Templates

For all the monitoring power of Zabbix's items, graphs, maps, and triggers, it would be incredibly cumbersome to manually create every single one of these objects for every monitored host. In the case of a large environment, with hundreds or thousands of monitored objects, it would be practically impossible to manually configure all the items, graphs, and triggers needed for each host.

Using the templates facility, you'll define different collections of items, triggers, and, graphs in order to apply common configurations to any number of hosts, while still being able to manage any single aspect you may need to tweak for any single host.

The perfect complement to the template facility is Zabbix's discovery feature. Using it, you'll define a set of rules to let Zabbix know of new hosts without having to manually create them. You can also take advantage of the low-level discovery powers of the Zabbix agent so that you can automatically assign the correct items even...