Deploying Zabbix Agent on Hundreds of Servers Using Ansible

After setting up a Zabbix server, the article demonstrates how to automatically install Zabbix‑agent on dozens or hundreds of Linux hosts using Ansible.

It first shows the test environment IPs and the modification of /etc/ansible/hosts to define the inventory.

Example inventory entries:

[web]

k8s-master ansible_ssh_host=192.168.20.40

k8s-node3 ansible_ssh_host=192.168.20.39

The zabbix-agent.sh script is provided, which checks for the Zabbix repository, installs the agent if missing, updates the configuration file with the correct server address, and restarts the service.

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -f /etc/yum.repos.d/zabbix.repo ]; then
  rpm -ivh /root/zabbix-release-4.2-2.el7.noarch.rpm
fi
Zabbix_Agent=`rpm -qa |grep zabbix-agent|wc -l`
if [ $Zabbix_Agent -eq 0 ]; then
  yum -y install zabbix-agent
fi
sed -i 's/Server=127.0.0.1/Server=192.168.20.40/g' /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf
sed -i 's/ServerActive=127.0.0.1/ServerActive=192.168.20.40/g' /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf
systemctl restart zabbix-agent

The accompanying zabbix-agent.yml playbook copies the repository RPM and the script to each host, makes the script executable, runs it, and debugs the result.

---
- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: copy zabbix-agent.repo
      copy: src=/root/zabbix-release-4.2-2.el7.noarch.rpm dest=/root/
    - name: install zabbix-agent
      copy: src=/root/zabbix-agent.sh dest=/root/zabbix-agent.sh mode=755
    - name: run script
      shell: sh /root/zabbix-agent.sh
      register: result
    - debug: var=result

Running ansible-playbook zabbix-agent.yml executes the deployment, and the article includes screenshots of the playbook output.

Finally, the article shows how to verify that the Zabbix‑agent is listening on port 10050 on both the server and a node using netstat -nltp | grep 10050, with additional screenshots.

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:10050          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      11634/zabbix_agentd

tcp6       0      0 :::10050               :::*                    LISTEN      11634/zabbix_agentd