This post is in continuation of my earlier post on ‘How to install Zabbix on CentOS‘ and here I will show us how to deploy the Zabbix agent on a Windows machine and add the server into Zabbix so we can start monitoring it. This is very simple to do 
Steps:
1. Install and configure zabbix agent:
- Create a folder called ‘Zabbix‘ under C: drive (c:\zabbix)
- Download the Windows Zabbix agent files. Unzip the content, navigate to location of extracted content, open the bin folder, win32 or win64, copy all the content and paste it into the C:\zabbix folder earlier created. Also open the conf folder and copy the .conf file into C:\Zabbix
- Next open the file ‘zabbix_agentd.win.conf‘ using notepad++. This config file contains lots of parameters but for the purpose of this post and for simplicity, I have selected the following configs which should get you started. Copy the parameters below and replace the content of the file:
Note: Refer to this link for explanation of each parameters and options
——————————————————————–
# Log errors and warnings
DebugLevel=3
# Name of log file
LogFile=C:\Zabbix\Zabbix_agentd.log
# Zabbix Server
Server=<ip address of your zabbix server>
# Allow remote commands for reactive monitoring
EnableRemoteCommands=1
# Log all remotely executed commands
LogRemoteCommands=1
# Increase default timeout from 3 seconds
Timeout=5
# Increase default number of agents from 3
StartAgents=5
——————————————————————–
- Save the changes made and close the editor
- Open a command prompt with admin privileges, change directory to the Zabbix folder, run the following commands:
zabbix_agentd.exe -c C:\zabbix\zabbix_agentd.win.conf -i (To install the agent)
zabbix_agentd.exe -c C:\zabbix\zabbix_agentd.win.conf -s (To start the service)
Create Host group – Grouping servers together based on functions is a tidy way of applying single template or templates (metrics) in one instance.
- Login to zabbix’s web interface and navigate to Configuration>Host groups, click Create host group (top right). Enter details as follows and save
2. Add server to Zabbix
- Login to zabbix’s web interface and navigate to Configuration>Hosts, click Create host (top right). Enter details as highlighted below
- Click on Templates tab, click Add, select ‘Template OS Windows’ which currently has basic monitoring checks for Windows Servers e.g. memory, cpu, processes … Save configuration
- You will notice that the newly added server is showing status as Monitored but in some situations the agent isn’t available. This could be attributed to either a firewall port blocking if your network is segmented (vlans) or if the server windows firewall is enabled
- Quickest solution in a test environment is to disable the Windows Firewall and the availability icon should change from Red to Green after few minutes
- In couple of minutes you should start seeing this beautiful screen with lots of information about the health of your servers been monitored…
In upcoming posts I will be looking at the followings:
– Add perfmon counters for monitoring
– How to use the templates
– Create monitoring graphs for one-stop view of your whole platform
– Get zabbix to do simple proactive tasks like reset IIS based on a triggered alert
and more…