So far, we have mostly done manual configuration of Zabbix by adding hosts, items, triggers, and other entities. With the exception of templates, discussed in Chapter 8, Simplifying Complex Configuration with Templates, we haven't looked at ways to accommodate larger and more dynamic environments. In this chapter, we will discover ways to automatically find out about resources such as network interfaces or filesystems on hosts by using low-level discovery, scanning a subnet using network discovery, and allowing hosts to register themselves using active agent autoregistration.
While learning about these methods, we will also explore related features, such as global regular expressions, and find out more details about the features we already know of—including context for user macros.
As Zabbix has several ways to manage automatic entity configuration and they all operate in a different fashion, it is highly suggested to never use the term auto-discovery when...