Zabbix::Tiny is a Perl module that I wrote to automate much of the boilerplate that I found myself writing when I wanted to script against the Zabbix API. This article will take a brief look at exactly what advantages are provided by using Zabbix::Tiny. Finally a simple example script is provided, along with a step-by-step explanation of what it does.
Zabbix’s API has the advantage of being both extremely flexible and extremely powerful. Scripts that leverage the API can address many of the perceived ‘short-comings’, or commonly requested features of Zabbix. I wrote the Zabbix::Tiny module as a small interface to the API to abstract some of the boiler plate that I was repeating in each script I was writing without it. Rather than delve directly into the module and it’s uses, I wanted to first cover a few of the dependencies I rely on for (nearly) every script that I write using the Zabbix API. Any articles that I write in the future will consider these points as implied.
Zabbix 3.0 introduced a major new feature – encryption between Zabbix components. If you’d like to add a new host with encryption enabled, you would go to the documentation of the host.create method… and be surprised. It says nothing about the encryption at all. You might continue to the host object page, but that wouldn’t have anything on encryption either.
How so?
Continue reading How to set host encryption parameters via the API?
There are some conceptual things new Zabbix users sometimes misunderstand, and a popular one is about adding templates to groups.
Sometimes users expect that adding a template to the same group as hosts will make the template affect the hosts. It does not.
Continue reading Added a template to group, nothing happened