Having explored basic monitoring with Zabbix agent before, we looked at two major agentless monitoring solutions in this chapter, especially SNMP, and to a somewhat lesser extent, IPMI. Given the wide array of devices supporting SNMP, this knowledge should help us with both retrieving information from devices like printers, switches, UPSes, and others, while also listening and managing incoming SNMP traps from those.
Beware of starting to monitor large amount of network devices, especially if they have many interfaces. For example, adding 10 switches with 48 ports, even if you monitor single item per switch once a minute only, will make Zabbix poll eight new values per second (480 ports once a minute results in 480/60=8 new values per second). Usually more values per port are monitored, so such an increase can bring a Zabbix server down, and severely impact network performance.
IPMI, being more popular as the out-of-band monitoring and management solution for servers, should help...