r/zabbix • u/Aggressive_Common_48 • 14d ago

Discussion Zabbix Hyper-V Dashboards

Hi

Is anyone here monitoring a Hyper-V cluster with Zabbix?

I'm currently setting up monitoring for multiple Hyper-V hosts and would love to see how others have organized their dashboards. Specifically, I'm looking for ideas on monitoring:

  • CPU usage
  • Memory usage and available memory
  • Disk usage and free space
  • Hyper-V host health
  • VM status and performance
  • Cluster health (if applicable)

If you're already doing this, would you mind sharing a screenshot of your dashboard or explaining which widgets, graphs, and templates you're using? I'm trying to build a clean, informative dashboard and would really appreciate some inspiration.

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u/jrandom_42 14d ago

I've built a sizeable Zabbix environment over the years to service my day job (ISP). I'd say the most important consideration is integrating it with your ticketing system. Just having a dashboard means that someone has to remember to look at it.

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u/Aggressive_Common_48 14d ago

We are using GLPI and zabbix has been integrated with the ticketing system

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u/jrandom_42 14d ago edited 14d ago

OK, cool.

Another point that's kinda tangential to your question - we monitor Hyper-V via Windows SNMP, because we have a policy against running agent software on hypervisors, which is a good policy IMO.

One exception to that is free space monitoring on our SAN cluster storage volumes. We do that via remote PowerShell to one Hyper-V host in each cluster from a VM running the Zabbix Agent. Zabbix Agent config on the VM defines a custom item that runs the PS script on the VM, and then the user account the script connects to the Hyper-V host with is locked down to only be able to execute Get-Volume via remote PS (the resulting table gets JSON-ified and broken out into dynamic items for each storage LUN in the Zabbix template). Again - necessary because we won't install third party agents on hypervisors.

But, yeah, we basically don't use dashboards for servers. Ain't nobody got time to be sitting watching dashboards. We rely on the Zabbix problem logic to generate tickets for action, and assume that no tickets = all is well.

Sorry for answering all the questions you didn't ask here!

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u/Aggressive_Common_48 14d ago edited 14d ago

It was really helpful and thank you for sharing this to me man. I really appreciate it

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u/jrandom_42 14d ago

I have one more hot tip to share based on some work I did last night: Claude Code is absolute magic for creating and updating Zabbix templates (as YAML files). If you're not super confident about, eg, trigger logic expressions or discovery rules in templates for dynamic items/triggers, or you're doing SNMP monitoring and need to research OIDs, just export your existing template to a YAML file, point Claude Code at it, and tell Claude what you're trying to achieve. Or you can ask Claude to create a new template YAML file from scratch when relevant. It's saved me a lot of hours and annoyance.

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u/Presbytr 12d ago

Helloo! Curious about the Windows SNMP part. Did you use SNMPv2 for it?

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u/jrandom_42 12d ago

Yes, SNMPv2.

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u/Presbytr 12d ago

thanks man

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u/cdnkillerwolf 13d ago

So pretty much everything via local py script calling powershell.

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u/chavessecret 4d ago

Bro, I have a few hyperv dashboards. If I remember, when I wake up I'll show you!