ZABBIX 2.4 – 2 Zabbix Windows agent installation

Installation is very simple and includes 3 steps.

Create a configuration file.

Create a configuration file c:/zabbix_agentd.conf (it has a similar syntax to the UNIX agent configuration file).

An example configuration file is available in Zabbix source archive as conf/zabbix_agentd.win.conf.

Install agent as a Windows service.

zabbix_agentd.exe --install

If you wish to use a configuration file other than c:\zabbix_agentd.conf, you should use the following command for service installation:

zabbix_agentd.exe --config <your_configuration_file> --install

A full path to the configuration file should be specified.

Run agent.

Now you can use Control Panel to start the agent service or run:

zabbix_agentd.exe --start

To perform active checks on a host Zabbix agent needs to have the hostname defined. Moreover, the hostname value set on the agent side should exactly match the ”Host name” configured for the host in the frontend.

The hostname value on the agent side can be defined by either the Hostname or HostnameItem parameter in the agent configuration file – or the default values are used if any of these parameters are not specified.

The default value for HostnameItem parameter is the value returned by the “system.hostname” agent key and for Windows platform it returns the NetBIOS host name.

The default value for Hostname is the value returned by the HostnameItem parameter. So, in effect, if both these parameters are unspecified the actual hostname will be the host NetBIOS name.

So if both parameters are unspecified then the Zabbix agent will use NetBIOS host name to retrieve the list of active checks from the Zabbix server and to send results to it.

Starting from Zabbix agent 1.8.6 version for Windows the “system.hostname” key supports an optional parameter – type of the name. The default value of this parameter is “netbios” (for backward compatibility) and the other possible value is “host”.

So, to simplify the configuration of zabbix_agentd.conf file and make it unified, two different approaches could be used.

1. leave Hostname or HostnameItem parameters undefined and Zabbix agent will use NetBIOS host name as the hostname;
2. leave Hostname parameter undefined and define HostnameItem like this:
   HostnameItem=system.hostname[host]
   and the Zabbix agent will use the full, real (case sensitive) Windows host name as the hostname.