How to install Zabbix monitoring agent on CentOS 7

Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source network monitoring solution. If you have something in your network that you’d like to keep track of, Zabbix can monitor it without requiring a separate solution for each type of resource. It can track characteristics of hardware, such as CPU utilization and bandwidth use. Zabbix monitoring can also perform health checks on web and other applications, ensuring that they are still running and responding to requests in a timely manner. All of this is provided entirely free of charge on an open source platform, ensuring that small and large organizations alike can enjoy the same rich monitoring solution.

This guide will set up the Zabbix monitoring agent on your CentOS 7 server. Agents are installed on the servers you want to monitor, and their reports are integrated on a central Zabbix server for easier review and analysis. You can also run the agent directly on the Zabbix server, though for best results these machines should be separate so Zabbix can report when a server has failed.

Getting started with Zabbix Monitoring Agent

Confirm that you have the following before you follow this guide:
• 1 Node (Cloud Server or Dedicated Server) running CentOS 7.
• Root access to the node or one sudo non-root user

Tutorial

Begin by installing the Zabbix package repository. This will not only let you install the Zabbix agent using the Yum package manager, but you’ll also be able to easily apply updates in the future.

rpm -ivh http://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/3.0/rhel/7/x86_64/zabbix-release-3.0-1.el7.noarch.rpm

With the repository installed, we can now install the package for the Zabbix agent.

yum install -y zabbix zabbix-agent

The agent should be installed, but it needs a server to which to send its metrics and other performance data. Here we’ll configure the agent to communicate with your Zabbix server.

nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf

Server=123.123.123.2
Hostname=zabbix1.globo.tech

In the above configuration, 123.123.123.2 is the IP of your Zabbix server. “Hostname” is the name of the client’s host on which the agent is being run. This name will be used to identify the server being monitored in Zabbix’ reports.

In order for the Zabbix agent to begin monitoring, we’ll need to start it. You’ll probably want monitoring to continue through reboots, so we’ll also enable the Zabbix agent service to launch when your server boots.

systemctl start zabbix-agent.service
systemctl enable zabbix-agent.service

Conclusion

The Zabbix agent is now monitoring this server’s resource use, and is sending its reports to the Zabbix server. You can repeat this process across a whole fleet of servers, and easily monitor them all from the Zabbix server node. Share this article with anyone you know who is looking for a good resource monitoring system.