Automatic service restart when some service down in Zabbix

Maciej

3 min readOct 7, 2020

Introduction

In this post I will show you how to easily restart services using the Zabbix monitoring system.

Environment

Vagrant +Ubuntu 18.04
Zabbix 4.0 LTS

Instruction how install Zabbix

Download Zabbix

Zabbix is being downloaded over 4 000 000 times every year for a reason. Download Zabbix for free and try it yourself!

www.zabbix.com

Adjust zabbix-agent configuration

If we want to use zabbix to restart services automatically, we need to enable some options in the zabbix -agent configuration.

Edit file /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf and enable this two options

### Option: EnableRemoteCommands
#       Whether remote commands from Zabbix server are allowed.
#       0 - not allowed
#       1 - allowed
#
# Mandatory: no
# Default:
EnableRemoteCommands=1### Option: LogRemoteCommands
#       Enable logging of executed shell commands as warnings.
#       0 - disabled
#       1 - enabled
#
# Mandatory: no
# Default:
LogRemoteCommands=1

Save file and restart service

root@vagrant:/home/vagrant# systemctl restart zabbix-agent
root@vagrant:/home/vagrant# systemctl restart zabbix-agent && systemctl status zabbix-agent
● zabbix-agent.service - Zabbix Agent
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/zabbix-agent.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-10-05 17:55:06 UTC; 17ms ago
  Process: 15064 ExecStop=/bin/kill -SIGTERM $MAINPID (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 15065 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd -c $CONFFILE (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 15067 (zabbix_agentd)
    Tasks: 6 (limit: 1111)
   CGroup: /system.slice/zabbix-agent.service
           ├─15067 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd -c /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf
           ├─15068 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd -c /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf
           ├─15069 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd: listener #1 [waiting for connection]
           ├─15070 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd: listener #2 [waiting for connection]
           ├─15071 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd: listener #3 [waiting for connection]
           └─15072 /usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd -c /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.confOct 05 17:55:06 vagrant systemd[1]: Starting Zabbix Agent...
Oct 05 17:55:06 vagrant systemd[1]: zabbix-agent.service: Can't open PID file /run/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.pid (yet?) after start: No such file or directory
Oct 05 17:55:06 vagrant systemd[1]: Started Zabbix Agent.

Verify if zabbix user have permission in your sudoers, ifdon’t edit /etc/sudoers (visudo) and add line:

zabbix ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart

Configure Actions in Zabbix WebUI

Create new Action

Explanation:

Operation type: We change it to Remote Command
Target list: We we should always choose a Host no matter if it’s remote host or localhost
Commands: The command to be executed when the trigger is fired

The full configured action should look like this:

Make a test!

Create item

Create trigger

Now we can stop rsyslog and wait for zabbix trigger

root@vagrant:/home/vagrant# systemctl stop rsyslog

After about 20 seconds a trigger will appear which will restart the stopped service.

The above scenario can be safely applied to other services.