But how independent is a proxy really? What happens if the server goes down? If we look at /etc/zabbix/zabbix_proxy.conf
, we can find a configuration parameter named ProxyOfflineBuffer
. This parameter controls how long the proxy will keep data in it's local database (in hours) in case Zabbix server cannot be contacted. Being one hour by default, this means the Zabbix server can be down or unreachable for up to one hour, and we would not lose any data as long as it came back online before the hour was up. Of course, you can increase this period but make sure you have enough free disk space, especially if running on embedded hardware.
Note
There are more proxy-specific configuration items available, they are listed later in this chapter.
There's one caveat - a proxy is a data collector only. This means that proxy does not process events, send out alerts, or execute remote commands. You need to pass the data to the Zabbix server so that it can do all those things.
Thus proxies...