hello
“Templates” are call “host template” and are already existing in your configuration if you installed the necessary plugins
in a nutshell : you have “plugin pack”, they contain the “templates” setup, and everything centreon web page will need to create a host in your interface. the plugin pack is installed on your central, you have a yum install to do, and then you can enable them in the configuration page
you also have “plugins” that must be installed on the poller(s), these are the command that are really running to do the check, they are configured by the plugin pack on the master.
not in a nutshell :
now, what it means to have a “Template”
a template provided by centreon will get you the basic “ping, cpu, ram, system service” of a windows/linux
next you can add disk and network by using autodiscovery, this will use the “service template”
on a switch, you get basic cpu/ram/health out of the host template, and you scan each interface with autodiscover
you can also not do autodiscover and add all the service manually (a bit long to do so)
you can also have a host template that will “configure” your host, what I usually do on my setup which have multiple client, password, snmp commity, I have multiple host template :
1 for each client where I put the password, community, etc…, these templates have no services associated. there may also be some notification contacts, or any meta information needed
then i have a standard host template for windows where I have all the windows service I need, but no password/snmp info
then I add the specific host “app template” for the application (iis, sql, other..)
most of the host template from centreon are inheriting from a template called generic_active_host_custom, most of the time you want to setup the basic password/snmp here and all the windows, linux, network will get that. if you want to have different value for different type of equipements, you can then put this informations in the corresponding host template (switch cisco with a different snmp community than the firewall for example)
same thing for the linux, or any network equipment, and also for the vcenter (this one is a bit more complicated and you really need to read the doc of the plugin, you must add a daemon on the poller to collect vmware information in the background)
the concept is that the templates are cumulative, you have host, app, protocol templates
and most of your setup should be using theses out of the box template, and you should put the information necessary in the “xxxxx_custom” template (login, password, community, etc...)