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Zabbix Host and Item Model

The Zabbix Host and Item Model defines the fundamental entities used to organize and collect monitoring data. At its core, the model relies on a Host entity to represent a device or service and Item entities to define specific Metrics or data points to be collected from those hosts^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].

Hosts

The Host entity represents the specific device or agent being monitored. It is a critical component that records comprehensive details about the target.^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md] This includes network information such as the IP address, as well as the internal hostid, the current operational status, and IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) data^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md]. The configuration of a Host serves as the anchor point for monitoring, allowing the system to associate collected data with a specific device^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].

Items

An Item represents an individual metric or data collection point on a host^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md]. The configuration for an item includes specific parameters such as:

  • Name: A descriptive label for the metric^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].
  • Delay: The interval in seconds between data collections^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].
  • History: The duration for which raw historical data should be stored^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].
  • Status: A flag (e.g., '0') indicating whether the item is enabled and active^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].
  • Units: The unit of measurement for the collected data (e.g., volts, bytes)1[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].

Each item is assigned a unique itemid and is linked to a specific host via a hostid^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].

Data Storage

Data collected by items is stored in the database in specialized tables. Raw historical data is segregated by data type into tables such as history, history_str, history_log, and history_uint_sync^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md]. For long-term storage and analysis, Zabbix processes this raw data into trends, calculating average and maximum values over statistical intervals (typically one hour)^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].

Organization

To manage large numbers of hosts, Zabbix utilizes the concept of Host Groups. The relationship between a specific host and its assigned group is maintained through a hosts_groups table^[600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md].

Sources

  • 600-developer__operation-maintenance__zabbix__zabbix-intro.md

  1. Inferred from "units保存item的单位" which translates to "units saves the unit of the item". ↩