Permissions are usually already correct in Fedora/RHEL-based distributions. If you're using distribution packages, don't execute the previous commands; they might even disallow access for the Zabbix server, as it might be running under a different group.
Add button at the bottom. Perform the usual round trip to
Monitoring |
Latest data—ICMP ping should be recording data already. If you wait for a few minutes, you can also take a look at a relatively interesting graph to notice any changes in the network performance.
Here, we set up ICMP ping measuring network latency in seconds. If you wanted to simply test host connectivity, you would have chosen the icmpping key, which would only record whether the ping was successful or not. That's a simple way to test connectivity on a large scale, as it puts a small load on the network (unless you use ridiculously small intervals). Of course, there are things to be aware of, such as doing something different to test Internet connectivity—it wouldn't be enough to test the connection to your router, firewall, or even your provider's routers. The best way would be to choose several remote targets to monitor that are known to have a very good connection and availability.
For ICMP ping items, several parameters can be specified. For example, the full icmpping key syntax is as follows:
icmpping[<target>,<packets>,<interval>,<size>,<timeout>]
By default, target is taken from the host this item is assigned to, but that can be overridden. The packets parameter enables you to specify how many packets each invocation should issue—usually, the fping default is 3. The interval parameter enables you to configure the interval between these packets—usually, the fping default is one second against the same target, specified in milliseconds. As for size, here, the default of a single packet could differ based on the fping version, architecture, and maybe other parameters. And the last one—timeout—sets individual target timeouts, with a common default being 500 milliseconds.
These defaults are not Zabbix defaults, if not specified,
fping defaults are used.
Note that we should not set ICMP ping items with very large timeouts or packet counts; it can lead to weird results. For example, setting the packet count to 60 and using a 60-second interval on an item will likely result in that item missing every second value.
If you set up several ICMP ping items against the same host, Zabbix invokes the fping utility only once. If multiple hosts have ICMP ping items, Zabbix will invoke fping once for all hosts that have to be pinged at the same time with the same parameters (such as packet, size, and timeout).
fping needs the SUID bit set to work properly. This is because
fping needs root permissions to work but we run our Zabbix setup as a regular Zabbix
user. In most cases, this will be set out of the box by your distribution but, just in case, check it if you run into issues. The proper settings can be verified like this: