Importing AD/LDAP users and groups into Zabbix

I’ve been a Zabbix user for quite some time already, but one thing that I always wanted and which Zabbix lacks as a feature so far is the ability to import AD/LDAP users and groups.

Zabbix already supports authentication against an AD/LDAP directory server, but in order for you to authenticate against the AD/LDAP directory server you need to have the users imported to the Zabbix database first.

Now, that could easily become annoying especially when your AD/LDAP directory server has lots of users and groups and you want to allow them access to the Zabbix Frontend.

Fortunately for us we can we use the Zabbix API in order to manage the Zabbix users and groups.

In this post we will see how we can import and update AD/LDAP users and groups into the Zabbix database.

Requirements

You also need to have your Zabbix Frontend configured to authenticate against an AD/LDAP directory server.

Check the official documentation of Zabbix on how to configure Zabbix to authenticate against an AD/LDAP directory server.

You will also need the zabbix-ldap-sync script which takes care of properly importing our AD/LDAP users and groups to Zabbix.

In order to grab the latest version of zabbix-ldap-sync clone the Git repository by executing the command below:

$ git clone https://github.com/dnaeon/zabbix-ldap-sync.git

Configuration

The first thing we need to do is to prepare a configuration file, which describes the various AD/LDAP and Zabbix related configs entries.

Here is an example configuration file:

[ldap]
uri = ldaps://ldap.example.org:636/
base = dc=example,dc=org
groups = sysadmins

[zabbix]
server = http://zabbix.example.org/zabbix/
username = admin
password = adminp4ssw0rd

As you can see from the above configuration file we are defining the various LDAP settings such as the LDAP URI, the LDAP search base and the LDAP groups we want to import into our Zabbix database.

The configuration file also defines the URL to our Zabbix Frontend and the username/password credentials with admin access.

Importing the AD/LDAP users and groups into Zabbix

Once you have the zabbix-ldap-sync script and the configuration file ready we can import our AD/LDAP users and groups into the Zabbix database.

Here is an example command which you can use in order to import your AD/LDAP users and groups to Zabbix:

$ zabbix-ldap-sync -f /path/to/zabbix-ldap.conf

The script reports each user and group that will be imported into Zabbix. Once the script completes you should check your Zabbix Frontend to verify that users are successfully imported.

You would generally be running the above script on regular basis, say each day from cron(8) in order to make sure your Zabbix system is in sync with LDAP.

Written on January 26, 2014