Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Monitoring Hyper-V with Zabbix

Zabbix is a opensource monitoring solution, which helps you keep track of the health of your IT systems.

You can host it on your own infrastructure or use one of the many hosted zabbix SAAS offerings.

A very helpful feature is, to be able to write your own monitoring scripts and integrate them with dashboards and alerts.

Beside a core set of templates and scripts, there also exists a big list of templates and github repositories, which help you monitor almost everything.

If you don't find the perfect template for your use case, then you can still write your own scripts and templates and then integrate them in your Zabbix infrastructure.

For VMWare there is very good support out of the box (At least for the commercial VMWare products).

For Hyper-V from Microsoft there is no such support built it.

For this reason, I have contributed to a project, which was adding hyper-v monitoring to Zabbix.

As the project owner did give up the project, I did tyke over the project and did smal improvements over the years. But as the requirements did start to rise, I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This way I could start with a clean base and also use all the new features added in Zabbix 4.x - 7.0. Two topics have been very usefull in that part: Calculated/Dependent items and the JSON + JS post- and pre- processing.

The result is a brand new monitoring script and associated templates for Zabbix 7.x and up. You can find the solutions in this github repository.

If you use Zabbix and Hyper-V, give it a try and comment on this post or give feedback via github. I'm interested to hear, what works good and where I could improve the monitoring.

On a technical note, I did heavily use Claude for this new implementation, I will follow up with my learnings of the AI usage for this scenario. As always, there is good and there is bad to tell about, just stay tuned for the next article.

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Install Zabbix agent on TrueNAS Scale

In my previous posts I did give instructions on how to monitor TrueNAS CORE (or FreeNAS) via Zabbix.

Unfortunatly this does not work for TrueNAS SCALE, as it's Linux based, but this is no real distro where you can install packages.

But you are not out of options, you can still monitor TrueNAS SCALE via SNMP.

There even exists a Zabbix template for this.

https://github.com/tr1plus/zabbix_truenas_SCALE_snmp/tree/main

What you have to do:

  • Download the template from the Github link above
  • Import the Template into your Zabbix Server
  • Create the TureNAS host with SNMP interface (and secrets) enabled
  • On the TrueNAS activate SNMP under System->Services
  • Make sure password is correct and the SNMP service is set to "Start on boot"

Shortly after, you should see data comming into Zabbix.

If not, then check if your firewall(s) have Port 161 open for the SNMP monitoring.

Happy Monitoring