Handy Tips #38: Automating SNMP item creation with low-level discovery

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Zabbix Certified Expert & Trainer

September 22, 2022

Let Zabbix automatically discover and start monitoring your SNMP data points. Creating items manually for each network interface, fan, temperature sensor, and other SNMP data points can be a very time-consuming task. To save time, Zabbix administrators need to automate item, trigger, and graph creation as much as possible. Automate item, trigger and graph creation […]

Let Zabbix automatically discover and start monitoring your SNMP data points.

Creating items manually for each network interface, fan, temperature sensor, and other SNMP data points can be a very time-consuming task. To save time, Zabbix administrators need to automate item, trigger, and graph creation as much as possible.

Automate item, trigger and graph creation with SNMP low-level discovery rules:

An entity will be created for each of the discovered indexes
Specify multiple OIDs to discover additional information about an entity

Filter entities based on any of the discovered OID values
Low-level discovery can be used with SNMP v1, v2c and v3

Check out the video to learn how to use Zabbix low-level discovery to discover SNMP entities.

How to use Zabbix low-level discovery to discover SNMP entities:

Navigate to Configuration → Hosts and find your SNMP host
Open the Discovery section and create a discovery rule
Provide a name, a key, and select the Type – SNMP agent
Populate the SNMP OID field with the following LLD syntax
discovery[{#LLD.MACRO1},<OID1>,{#LLD.MACRO2},<OID2>]
Navigate to the Filters section and provide the LLD filters
Press Add to create the LLD rule
Open the Item prototypes section and create an item prototype
Provide the Item prototype name and key
Populate the OID field ending it with the {#SNMPINDEX} LLD macro
Configure the required tags and preprocessing rules
Press Add to create the item prototype
Wait for the LLD rule to execute and observe the discovered items

Tips and best practices

snmpwalk tool can be used to list the OIDs provided by the monitored device
If a particular entity does not have the specified OID, the corresponding macro will be omitted for it
OIDs can be added to your LLD rule for usage in filters and tags
The {#SNMPINDEX} LLD macro is discovered automatically based on the indexes listed for each OID in the LLD rule

Learn how Zabbix low-level discovery rules can be used to automate the creation of your Zabbix entities by attending our Zabbix Certified Professional course. During the course, you will learn the many use cases of low-level discovery by performing a variety of practical tasks under the guidance of a Zabbix certified trainer.