It should be simple, so it is just most likely my approach being totally off and someone will hopefully prod me into the right direction.

We have a Zabbix 2.0.3 server instance set up monitoring a bunch of different servers, but now we need to set it up to monitor and notify any alerts in regards to the SQL Server 2008 R2 Failover Active-Passive cluster.

Essentially, this is a 2 servers cluster, when only one of its nodes can be "active" at a given time, serving all SQL Server related requests, while the other server just "sleeps" and from the point of anyone logged on on that server - has all of the SQL Server related services in stopped state.

We have tried setting up Zabbix agents on both servers, using SQL Server 2005 templates (we could not find any 2008 specific ones and the 2005 ones always seemed to be working just fine for monitoring 2008 R2 instances) and configuring Zabbix server for both of the servers, but we end up having constant alerts for the server being currently the passive one in the cluster. We have been able to look up various methods of actually monitoring the failover, but we have not been able to find any guidance in regards to how to instruct Zabbix, that in this particular case, only one of the servers in the group is expected to be in the online state, while the other can be just discarded and should not raise any alerts.

I hope I made myself clear. Thanks for any guidance. I am out of ideas.