Handy Tips #11: Collect and send custom metrics with Zabbix sender

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Zabbix Certified Expert & Trainer

November 11, 2021

Collect custom metrics from your in-house applications and forward them to your Zabbix instance by utilizing the Zabbix sender command-line tool. As you scale up our monitoring, you will inevitably encounter a situation where a particular metric can be quite complex to collect with native monitoring techniques. Zabbix sender can use multiple methods to ingest […]

Collect custom metrics from your in-house applications and forward them to your Zabbix instance by utilizing the Zabbix sender command-line tool.

As you scale up our monitoring, you will inevitably encounter a situation where a particular metric can be quite complex to collect with native monitoring techniques.

Zabbix sender can use multiple methods to ingest custom metrics and forward them to your Zabbix instance:

Send metrics to Zabbix server or Zabbix proxy
Invoke Zabbix sender from the command-line and pass metrics to it
Users can restrict specific item keys or define restrictions based on item key patternsZabbix sender can collect metrics from an input file

Zabbix sender can send metrics from Windows and Linux environments
Standard input data can be passed to Zabbix sender

Check out the video to learn how to use Zabbix sender to send custom metrics to your Zabbix instance.

How to use Zabbix sender to send custom metrics to your Zabbix instance:

Create a new host in Configuration → Hosts
Remember the exact host name of the new host
Navigate to Configuration → Hosts → Your host → Items
Press the Create item button
Create a new item with Type Zabbix trapper
Remember the exact item key for the new item
Connect to your host shell via SSH
Install the Zabbix sender package
Invoke the Zabbix sender and send a value to the trapper item on your new host
Navigate to Monitoring → Latest data
Filter by the new host and the trapper item
Observe the last received value
The value should match the one sent from the Zabbix sender

Tips and best practices:

The hostname and item key in the Zabbix frontend should match the host and key being passed to the Zabbix sender
The hostname and the Zabbix server address can be passed to the sender from the Zabbix agent configuration file
The trapper item type of information should match the data that is being sent by the Zabbix sender
Custom timestamp can be assigned to the metric when reading it from a file
Zabbix sender connections can be encrypted
Preprocessing can be used to further transform the received metrics