Living without zabbix-sender

2018-10-28 277 words 2 minutes

Contents

If you like Zabbix and you’re using it, you know that sometimes you need to send a value from the monitored host to the zabbix server/proxy. One of the most common scenario, for me, is the status of a backup job when this is managed by the host: at the end of the job I usually call a script that sends the backup status (OK or KO) through zabbix-sender. Like this:

do_backup && STATUS=OK || STATUS=KO
zabbix_sender --zabbix-server $ZABBIX_SERVER --host "$ZABBIX_HOSTNAME" \
  --key $ZABBIX_HOSTKEY --value "Backup $STATUS"

On the zabbix server side, there’s an item of type “trapper” in the corresponding host, which will be updated. And with a couple of triggers (“backup error” and “no good backups in the last 12 hours”) we can sleep well.

You don’t need the sender

Sadly, sometimes, you can’t have the zabbix_sender. Typically because you’re on a strange architecture, or have very limited resources, or running on an AS/400.

Here’s a workaround script, in python, that doesn’t need to be fed into the zabbix_sender. This is based on this protocol.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import datetime
import json
import socket

ZABBIX_SERVER = '333.12.33.44'
ZABBIX_HOSTNAME = 'TEST'
ZABBIX_ITEMKEY = 'test'
PORT = 10051
BUFFER_SIZE = 1024

# just replace this with the desired value
msg = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("Message timestamp: %Y/%m/%d-%H:%M:%S")

msg_json = json.dumps({
    "request":"sender data",
    "data":[
        {
            "host": ZABBIX_HOSTNAME,
            "key": ZABBIX_ITEMKEY,
            "value": msg
        }
    ]
})

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

(family, socktype, proto, garbage, address)=socket.getaddrinfo(HOST, PORT)[0]
sock = socket.socket(family, socktype, proto)
sock.connect(address)
sock.send(msg_json)
recv_data = sock.recv(BUFFER_SIZE)
sock.close()

# you don't really need to print
# you're receiving something like this:
#      ZBXDZ{"response":"success","info":"processed: 1; failed: 0; total: 1; seconds spent: 0.000200"}
print "received data:", recv_data