As earlier promised, I will be showing us how to add Perfmon counters in Zabbix. For the purpose of this post, I will start by adding monitor for DNS Port (53); DNS Queries Received/sec and setup a Trigger. Click here for steps on how to determine a Perfmon Key value…
Note: Its advisable to group all items into templates hence making it easier to simply assign the template to new servers or server groups based on server type or function as you choose.
1. Create new Template for Active Directory
- Log onto your Zabbix server → Go to Configuration → Templates. Click on Create template
- Enter the template name → assign this new template to a group (Windows Servers or create a new group) → click the group drop-down at bottom right and select the group your server belongs to → select the server from the list and add to host in → click Save
- Now on the Templates screen, locate the newly added template → click the Applications link → click Create application (top right corner) → Enter Application name and click Save
2. Create items for both DNS Port and DNS Queries Received/sec perfmon counter
DNS Port monitoring
- From within the newly created application screen, click on Items in front
- Next click Create item at top right corner. Enter details as shown below and save
DNS Queries Received/sec
- Repeat above steps → enter details as shown below and save
- After saving both items, confirm that the agent isn’t reporting any error by looking at the error column and confirm both showing green tick
3. Create a Trigger – The trigger will be for the DNS port (I believe you know why this is important 
)
- Go to Configuration → Templates → click on Triggers (0) for the Template Active Directory
- Click on Create trigger at top right corner. Ensure Host drop-down is pointing to the right Template
- Enter name for the trigger → Under Expression use the expression format “{<server>:<key>.<function>(<parameter>)}<operator><constant>” → You can add a description also → select your desired Severity → Enable trigger and save
4. Test if trigger is working
- Open the DNS server mmc console → right-click on server → all Tasks → Stop
- Go to zabbix → click on Monitoring → Dashboard → you should see an alert message displayed under Last 20 Issues screen
Upcoming posts:
– More zabbix alert configurations
– Triggers and alerting via email or sms
– Setup and use of graphs
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