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monitoringzabbix

Role of Item Key in Zabbix

In Zabbix every item has several defining characteristics like Name, Type, Data Type, etc. One of these properties is "Item Key". But in the Zabbix's documentation nothing is mentioned about it's use. I wanted to know why in Zabbix every item has a key (other than the name)?

Solution

  • I searched more and I understood that in Zabbix an item is identified in two different ways:

    • A human friendly name: using Name of the item
    • An agent friendly name: Zabbix-Agent should have a way to know what do you want from it to fetch. This is done using "Item Keys". There are plenty of predefined "Item Keys" (platform-dependent). You can also define your own "Item Key".