When should i link a host to a host group or template in Zabbix?

Question

What i understand is that templates defines common entities to reuse them and groups allows us to classify our hosts.

Templates are well documented but host groups not. And again, what i understood is that we can link hosts to groups, hosts to templates and templates to groups.

• groups --> hosts
• templates --> hosts
• groups --> templates

So is a quite confusing and if those concepts are not clear it's easy to mess up our Zabbix instance ... i would like to clarify in which cases is more suitable:

• link a host to a host group
• link a host to a template
• link a template to a group

Answer 1

Use a template for hosts that should be treated in the same way.
Use a group for hosts with the same characteristcs (functional or technical).

When you have a host group combined for technical reasons, you can add that group to a template.

Example:

You have test, acceptance and production hosts, each with a webserver, application server and database server. You also have a standalone Windows webserver for documentation.
Test is running windows, acc and prod are running Linux.

Templates: webservers, appservers, dbservers, linuxsystems, windows systems. Groups: test, acceptance, production. Optional groups: webservers, appservers, dbservers (perhaps your DBA only wants to see the how the databases are running and your Java team only the AppServers).

Templates webservers, appservers, dbservers all member of Linuxsystems when you never want Windows. When you might want Windows too, make the Linux systems direct members of the linux systems.

test webserver - template web, groups test and web
acceptance webserver - template web, groups acc and web
production webserver - template web, groups prod and web

test appserver - template app, groups test and app
acceptance appserver - template app, groups accp and app
production appserver - template app, groups prod and app

test dbserver - template db, groups test and db
acceptance dbserver - template db, groups accp and db
production dbserver - template db, groups prod and db

standalone webserver - template web, template windows, group web
template test connected to template windows
template accp and prod connected to Linux

When you add a monitoring item for the app, you only need to add this to the template app.
When you want to make look at your production servers, filter on the production group.