Collect metrics in bulk and reduce monitoring performance overhead with master and dependent items.
Data collection efficiency is an important aspect of monitoring. We need to ensure that our monitoring approach has a minimal impact both on the monitoring system and the system that is being monitored.
Improve your metric collection efficiency and reduce the performance overhead with master and dependent items:
- Dependent items can extract data from a master item by using preprocessing
- Combine multiple preprocessing steps for best results
- Up to 3 dependency levels are supported
- Up to 29999 dependent items for a single master item
Check out the video to learn how to define master and dependent items
How to define master and dependent items:
- Navigate to Configuration → Hosts and create a new host representing your API endpoint
- Input the Host name, Host group, and add an arbitrary interface
- Click the Add button
- In Configuration → Hosts Click on the Items button next to the host
- Click the Create item button
- Select the Type – HTTP agent and populate the URL with your API endpoint address
- Select the Type of information – Text
- Click the Add button
- Create another item of type Dependent item
- Define item Key and item Name with arbitrary values
- Open the Preprocessing tab
- Use a preprocessing step (ex. JSONPath) to extract the required value from the master item
- Click the Add button
- Navigate to Monitoring → Latest data and filter by your host
- Observe the collected metrics
Tips and best practices:
- Dependent items don’t have their own update intervals
- Dependent item values get updated as soon as the master item receives a new value
- Deleting a master item will also delete the items that depend on it
- Item of any type can be used as a master item
