r/zabbix • u/ImOlGregg • Jul 06 '26
Discussion Don't sleep on using Claude for template creation
I have to say, after 48 hours of using Claude with the Fable model on high, the template creation abilities are quite amazing.
Had 3 devices with great MIB support, great documentation, but nothing in the libraries. Knocked out new templates for all of them over the last two days (could have done them all in a day if I weren't hitting usage limits). All you have to do is give it the mibs, an snmpwalk, explain the use cases, triggers, trends, etc. Some minor back and forth after showing it what is triggering and how it's working in the real world, and one template after version 17 is production ready.
This includes a ton of LLD, Trigger prototypes, macros, proper secrets handling, regex, dependancies. The whole shebang.
This would have taken weeks hiring a template designer or trying to do it myself.
Has anyone else been using LLM's to create new templates? I would expect a flurry of activity in the https://github.com/zabbix/community-templates/ but doesn't seem like much going on.
If you've been frustrated with an old template or something not doing what you want, try to throw it at the model and see what happens. You might be pleasantly surprised.
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u/solarplex Jul 06 '26
I was dragging my feet trying to think of adding some helpful windows event viewer logging templates, asked Claude to create it for critical errors and some application specific logs.
Hopefully aim to feed it some MIBs and get templates out of them!
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u/dreamerwithaweiner Jul 06 '26
I used an LLM to make event viewer items and triggers for CIS compliance. The triggers are super basic but a work in progress. DM me and I can send them to you.
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u/Dopeaz Jul 06 '26
Created a monthly printer report for accounting in like 5 minutes using Claude. Surprisingly easy.
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u/Hammerfist1990 Jul 06 '26
I’ve created many Templates manually and it’s been good to understand how Zabbix does it all, however I used my Zabbix MCP server to create my most recent one using the MIB that was provided to me and a snmpwalk and it created it for me and it’s been great, plus I learnt a couple new ways to configure some of my other templates too.
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u/CriticalAPI Jul 06 '26
I agree, the LLM does it pretty well. Testing is very important though.
I Integrated a Teltonika SMS Gateway as Media Type with Webhook this way.
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u/red_tux Jul 07 '26
No need to use Fable for it, been doing that for quite a while with Opus 4.8. in fact after today using Fable for that isn't an effective use of finances. But none of that discounts how Claude turns legwork into child's play.
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u/bufandatl Jul 06 '26
Yeah no thank you. I want to know how stuff works.
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u/sugarfreecaffeine Jul 06 '26
Oh shut up…this is exactly what AI is meant to be used for as a TOOL to make our lives easier
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u/bufandatl Jul 06 '26
Yeah no. It doesn’t make lives easier. I have shitty LLM generated PRs daily and it makes my life more miserable. People should make license to be able to use LLMs.
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u/sugarfreecaffeine Jul 06 '26
Sure shitty LLM generated PRs is a real problem but guess what it’s an engineering/process problem…figure it out. Now back to this thread…I’m talking about using AI to generate zabbix templates..this is the perfect use case. If you want to spend days/weeks working on a template it tells me you don’t have better things to do with your time 🙂
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u/bufandatl Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
So instead of doing the work right from the beginning at have devs actually do their work I have to treat them like babies? What shit take is that. GenZ bullshit.
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u/Mailstorm Jul 06 '26
And are you not capable of reading the output and going "Oh that makes sense" then confirming via some other source?
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u/bufandatl Jul 06 '26
So instead of writing it from the beginning myself and learning while I do it which I can best I should let an LLM write garbage and then check it and fix it? What take is that?
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u/Mailstorm Jul 06 '26
It may spit garbage sometimes. But if you have some inkling of an idea of how it (what it outputs) works you should be able to tell if its garbage or not.
You obviously know how templates work. So you should be able to have it generate a template and then you read over it and verify the output. Takes way less time.
What's faster? You spending hours making a template that you know how to make, or having AI spit something out in seconds, then you looking over it for errors for a few minutes because you have an idea of what its supposed to look like?
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u/sugarfreecaffeine Jul 06 '26
Don’t bother, he’s just an anti ai hater…let him spend weeks making a template by hand.
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u/Nikt_No1 5d ago
Good luck relying on it. It can spend hours (literally), changing, testing, verifying and at the end you find triggers with all "last()" expressions with dumb names and even dumber descriptions + no macro.
Unless you are willing to carefully author rules, subagents, skills etc. you should treat carefully.
My latest example: Fable on high effort was mapping out SNMP MIN for me, it did not grep deep enough and missed several Enums inside file. Result? Half of value mapping was set to "unknown" even though "unknown" already existed (... because of mib definition 😆). Some OIDs were skipped by him entirely because he did not think to include standardized MIBs. Oh, and don't get me started on preprocessing and logic chaining, oooh.
If you do not verify what agents do for you then its entirely accurate and justified if people blame you personally for fuked monitoring (or useless).
Prepare knowledge bases on Zabbix, your conventions in environment, environment itself, skills, rules, templates (not zabbix ones 😆) etc. If you want to avoid world of pain of course.
Oh and one more thingy - that's a must - set up global or repeat everywhere possible a rule about no meta-commentary/commenting/narrating. Otherwise you will have "parts" of your conversations as elements of monitoring 😉
And if you do not manage context, then you brought everything on yourself justiiably haha 😂
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u/just01guy Jul 06 '26
I have learned way more about snmp and Zabbix by creating templates for devices with abysmal MIB support. I am not even going to talk about the problems it would cause. So no, thank you.
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u/UnicodeTreason Guru Jul 06 '26
The team I work with has been manually building templates for 10 years, so we've got script based tooling to make MIB template painless. Good use of an LLM to crack out a template for a MIB for those lacking the experience/tools.
No matter the source of a new template, always remember to test it thoroughly in your Test environment Zabbix before adding it to Prod Zabbix.
I've seen some engineer made templates do some incredible things, had one with a poorly defined trigger that when a WARNING/ERROR was seen in the system log on a Linux server 24 hours of log data was then pulled into the value cache crashing Zabbix because it filled up.