What if we care only about the basic reachability of a host, such as a router or switch that is out of our control? ICMP ping (echo request and reply) would be an appropriate method for monitoring in that case, and Zabbix supports such simple checks. Usually, these won't work right away; to use them, we'll have to set up a separate utility, fping, which Zabbix uses for ICMP checks. It should be available for most distributions, so just install it using your distribution's package-management tools. If not, you'll have to download and compile fping manually; it's available at http://fping.sourceforge.net/.
fping should come with your distribution if not make sure it is installed on your system. If you make use of SELinux, ...
