Once your Zabbix configuration starts to monitor for that a few hundred Items, you’re going to be relying heavily on Templates. Along with using Templates to replicate the monitoring of more than one server, you probably need to start using Global Macros.

The concept of a Template is “write once, use many”, and Global Macros are very similar. An example might be a license key for an external service or the credentials for an internal service (there are better ways of storing secrets), perhaps a SQL database that is used just for Zabbix. Using these credentials and values scattered throughout your code is just going to give you headaches if they ever change, and we all know they will.

The idea here is that the values are placed at a global level in your Zabbix configuration and then used anywhere you’d like. Need to change credential values? Just change it once in the Global Macros and the change ripples through Zabbix. An example is below of Global Macros is below.

To use them, just put values in (mine are fuzzied out) and then use them throughout as you would any Macro. But instead of at the Macro value being attached to the Host, it’s defined everywhere. An example is below:

When you save an Item like this, each time it runs, it will look for the value of the Macro called {$HOST_DNS} – saving you lots of configuration headaches, now and especially in the future as your configuration changes.