This time, we created a new host and added several normal or passive agent items and active agent items.
We learned that it is good practice to disable active items if they are not used by commenting out the ServerActive parameter. If passive items are not used, they can be disabled by setting StartAgents to 0, although leaving them enabled can help with testing and debugging.
We set up simple checks on two different hosts and explored many tricks and mechanisms to ease managing in the frontend, such as item cloning, copying, and value mapping.
It might be worth remembering how connections are made for active and passive Zabbix agent item types—that's important when you have to decide on monitoring mechanisms based on existing network topology and configuration.
Let's look at the following diagram, summarizing those connections. The arrow direction denotes how connections are made:
Discussing benefits and drawbacks, we found that active items are recommended over passive items in most...