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