Currently, we are monitoring several parameters on our hosts, including network traffic. We configured those items by finding out the interface name and then manually specifying it for all of the relevant items. Interface names could be different from system to system, and there could be a different number of interfaces on each system. The same could happen with filesystems, CPUs, and other entities. They could also change—a filesystem could get mounted or unmounted. Zabbix offers a way to deal with such different and potentially dynamic configurations with a feature called low-level discovery. In the Zabbix documentation and community, it it usually known as LLD, and that is how we will refer to it in this book, too.
Low-level discovery normally enables us to discover entities on existing hosts (we will discuss more advanced functionality related to discovering hosts with LLD in Chapter 18, Monitoring VMware). LLD is an extremely widely used feature, and there are few...