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Monitor pfsense with Zabbix
Zabbix has templates out of the box to monitor your Pfsense device that runs on FreeBSD. There is a host template than can provide basic metrics, cpu, memory, swap. Using this template on my pfsense was useful to see how the host was performing, but the default Zabbix host template provides little insight into the how the packet filter is performing. Zabbix also has an SNMP template out of the box. I chose to pursue an agent based approach because I wanted more control over the types of data I was collecting, like CPU temps, and I have more familiarity with agent collection vs SNMP collection.
What to monitor?
When I was looking to embellish the exiting template to see how pfsense is performing, one inspiration is from pfsense own monitoring charts under Status->Monitoring
These charts are helpful, but don’t provide the ability to examine specific metrics in detail in the past. These help to highlight recent changes and longer term trends. Additionally, you can’t trigger on any changes related to performance, so increasing visibility and being able to take action was my motivation. Clicking on the wrench you can see that this chart is configurable to view several…
