We have looked at quite a lot of fairly custom and customizable ways to get data into Zabbix. Although external checks should allow us to grab data by any means whatsoever, in some cases we might need to collect data from some system that is reachable over SSH or even Telnet, but there is no way to install an agent on it. In that case, a more efficient way to retrieve the values would be to use the built-in SSH or Telnet support.
Let's look at the SSH items first. As a simple test, we could re-implement the same Zabbix agent parameter we did as our first user parameter, determining the number of the currently logged-in users by running who | wc -l. To try this out, we need a user account we could use to run that command, and it is probably best to create a separate account on "A test host". Creating one could be as simple as the following:
# useradd -m -s /bin/bash zabbixtest # passwd zabbixtest