Filtering the traps

While that is great for receiving all traps in a single location, it also makes traps harder to correlate to particular hosts, and especially hard to observe if you have lots and lots of trap-sending hosts. In such a case, it becomes very desirable to split incoming traps in some sort of logical structure, similar to the way we did with the Perl receiver solution earlier. At the very least, a split based on existing hosts can be performed. In this case, all received traps would be placed in a single item for that host. If there are particular traps or trap groups that are received very often or are very important, these can be further split into individual items.

For example, if a network switch is sending various traps, including link up and down ones, we'll probably want to place these in a single item so they do not obscure other traps that much. If the switch has many workstations connected that are constantly switched on and off, we might even want to drop these traps before they reach Zabbix. On the other hand, if this switch has very important connections that should never go down, we might even go as far as creating an individual item for notifications coming from each port.

All the methods work by either replacing, improving, or hooking into the handler script, snmptraps.sh.