A monitoring system is, by definition, all about connecting and communicating with other systems. On the one hand, it needs to connect to its monitored objects in order to take measurements and evaluate the service status. On the other hand, it needs to be able to communicate the collected information outside of itself so that system administrators can act on the data and an alarm is raised. In the previous chapters of the book, we focused mainly on the first part of the equation, namely collecting data, and always assumed that the second part, exposing data and warnings, would involve sending a series of messages to human operators. While this is certainly the most common setup, the one that will be at the core of every Zabbix deployment, it's also true that it can prove to be quite limited in a large, complex IT environment.

Every managing system has a specific, detailed view of its environment that is directly dependent on the function it must perform. Identity...