Hostname parameter

To perform active checks on a host Zabbix agent needs to have the hostname defined. Moreover, the hostname value set on the agent side should exactly match the “Host name” configured for the host in the frontend.

The hostname value on the agent side can be defined by either the Hostname or HostnameItem parameter in the agent configuration file - or the default values are used if any of these parameters are not specified.

The default value for HostnameItem parameter is the value returned by the “system.hostname” agent key and for Windows platform it returns the NetBIOS host name.

The default value for Hostname is the value returned by the HostnameItem parameter. So, in effect, if both these parameters are unspecified the actual hostname will be the host NetBIOS name. Zabbix agent will use NetBIOS host name to retrieve the list of active checks from Zabbix Server and send results to it.

The system.hostname key always returns the NetBIOS host name which is limited to 15 symbols and in UPPERCASE only - regardless of the length and lowercase/uppercase characters in the real host name.

Starting from Zabbix agent 1.8.6 version for Windows the “system.hostname” key supports an optional parameter - type of the name. The default value of this parameter is “netbios” (for backward compatibility) and the other possible value is “host”.

The system.hostname[host] key always returns the full, real (case sensitive) Windows host name.

So, to simplify the configuration of zabbix_agentd.conf file and make it unified, two different approaches could be used:

• leave Hostname or HostnameItem parameters undefined and Zabbix agent will use NetBIOS host name as the hostname.
• leave Hostname parameter undefined and define HostnameItem like this and Zabbix agent will use the full, real (case sensitive) Windows host name as the hostname: HostnameItem=system.hostname[host]