Send notification upon Zabbix active agent shut down

I figured it out! My setup was correct afterall. Here's what was happening:

Triggers are only set when a state changes, therefore all my triggers were either false OR true and were not changing state as the items I was monitoring were not changing state either.

To successfully test my triggers, I had to do this:

1. Make an item to ping a server every 5 sec (you can just use a default template item but I wanted results fast...)

2. Make an action for my server which gets executed if:

   Trigger severity >= "Warning" AND Host = "My Server"

3. I then created a trigger which gets set if ping = 1 (which it always does...) and volia! I received an email

The problem I was having was that by creating my "test trigger" before my "test alert" the trigger was already getting set before my alert was saved. And so... i had no idea why I wasn't seeing any notifications.

One way to accomplish that would be to monitor whether Zabbix proxy is reachable. This is done using zabbix[proxy,<name>,lastaccess] internal item. In the documentation on internal items, it then suggests to use fuzzytime() trigger function to check availability of your proxy:

{<zabbix>:zabbix[proxy,<name>,lastaccess].fuzzytime(2m)}=0

After that you can make your "host unreachable" triggers depend on this trigger, which will stop them from being activated when proxy is unreachable (see documentation on trigger dependencies for more information).