An even more useful and important feature of Zabbix templates is their ability to support special kinds of items, which are called low-level discovery rules. Once applied to actual hosts, these rules will query the host for whatever kind of resources they are configured to look for: filesystems, network interfaces, SNMP OIDs, and more. For every resource found, the server will then dynamically create items, triggers, and graphs according to special entity prototypes connected to the discovery rules.

The great advantage of low-level discovery rules is that they take care of the more variable parts of a monitored host, such as the type and number of network interfaces, in a dynamic and general way. This means that, instead of manually creating specific items and triggers of every host's network interfaces or filesystems or creating huge templates with any possible kind of item for a particular operating system and keeping most of these items disabled, you can have a reasonable...