Configure Zabbix Server on CentOS 6.6 with Ansible

Introduction

Soon I will start my internship and I received the question if I knew something about this topic. Since I do not have any experience with Zabbix I wanted to configure this server in my test lab. In this post I will configure a CentOS 6.6 machine as Zabbix Server to monitor some Windows machines. To make it even more interesting for myself I used Ansible to configure it all.

What is Zabbix?

Wikipedia: "Zabbix is an enterprise open source monitoring solution for networks and applications, created by Alexei Vladishev. It is designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware."

Used Tools

- CentOS 7 Workstation to configure Ansible playbook's.
- CentOS 6.6 Minimal for Zabbix Server
- Hyper-V running Windows Server's / Zabbix Server

Prepare Server to accept Ansible Playbooks

Configure Ansible and run the Playbook

After these steps Ansible should be able to talk to our configured servers. We can test this with a single ping. The command used for this is "ansible all -m ping", this command pings all the servers in the hosts file from the previous step.

Ansible can communicate with our other server.

Next we need to configure the path where our Ansible roles will be located. This file can be found here: "/etc/ansible/ansible.cfg".

Now we have defined the path, lets make the necessary folders and files for Zabbix.

Here we configure the right roles for our hosts.

Now we can create the other files and folders for Zabbix.

main.yml (task folder)

MariaDB.repo (template folder)

zabbix.conf (template folder)

zabbix_server.conf (template folder)

Running the playbook