Now that you have a Zabbix installation that is properly sized for your environment, you will want to actually start monitoring it. While it's quite easy to identify which hosts and appliances, physical or otherwise, you may want to monitor, it may not be immediately clear what actual measurements you should take on them. The metrics that you can define on a host are called items, and this chapter will discuss their key features and characteristics. The first part will be more theoretical and will focus on the following:
Items as metrics, not for status checks
Data flow and directionality for items
Trapper items as a means to control the data flow
We will then move to a more practical and specific approach and will discuss how to configure items to gather data from the following data sources:
Databases and ODBC sources
Java applications, the JMX console, and SNMP agents
SSH monitoring
IMPI items
Web page monitoring
Aggregated and calculated items