LLD is concerned with discovering entities on an individual host. Zabbix also supports a way to scan a network address range and perform some operation based on what has been discovered there—that's called network discovery.
To see how this could work, let's have a simple discovery rule. We can discover our test systems, or we can point the discovery at some other network range that is accessible to the Zabbix server.
To create a network discovery rule, navigate to Configuration | Discovery and click on Create discovery rule. Fill in the name and IP range as desired, and then click on New in the Checks block. Choose ICMP ping in the Check type dropdown, and click on Add in this block. Additionally, change Delay to 120 so that we can more easily see the effects of any changes:
Tip
Make sure fping is properly configured—we did that in Chapter 3, Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols.