The SSH monitoring functionality provided by Zabbix, since it's server-triggered and even agentless, is quite useful. This specific functionality is precious as it allows us to run remote commands on a device that doesn't support the Zabbix agent. This functionality is tailor-made for all the cases where, for support reasons, we can't install a Zabbix agent. Some practical cases are given as follows:
A third-party, vendor-specific appliance where you can't install software
A device that has a custom-made operating system or a closed operating system
Note
To be able to run SSH checks, Zabbix needs to be configured with SSH2 support; here, the minimum supported libssh2 is Version 1.0.0.
SSH checks support for two different kinds of authentication:
SSH with username and password
Key file based authentication
To use the username/password pair authentication, we don't need to do any special configuration; it is enough to have compiled Zabbix with the SSH2 support.