Zabbix

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software tool for diverse IT components, including networks, servers, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud services. Zabbix provides monitoring metrics, among others network utilization, CPU load and disk space consumption. Zabbix monitoring configuration can be done using XML based templates which contain elements to monitor.[2] The software monitors operations on Linux, Hewlett Packard Unix (HP-UX), Mac OS X, Solaris and other operating systems (OSes); however, Windows monitoring is only possible through agents. Zabbix can use MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data.[3] Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. Zabbix offers several monitoring options:

  • Simple checks can verify the availability and responsiveness of standard services such as SMTP or HTTP without installing any software on the monitored host.
  • A Zabbix agent can also be installed on UNIX and Windows hosts to monitor statistics such as CPU load, network utilization, disk space, etc.
  • As an alternative to installing an agent on hosts, Zabbix includes support for monitoring via SNMP, TCP and ICMP checks, as well as over IPMI, JMX, SSH, Telnet and using custom parameters. Zabbix supports a variety of near-real-time notification mechanisms, including XMPP.
Zabbix
Zabbix 3.4.0 dashboard, dark theme
Developer(s)Zabbix LLC
Initial releaseApril 2001 (2001-04)
Stable release
5.2.3[1] / December 21, 2020 (2020-12-21)
Repository
Written inC (server, proxy, agent), PHP (frontend), Java (Java gateway)
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeNetwork management system
LicenseGPLv2
Websitewww.zabbix.com

Released under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2, Zabbix is free software.

History

Zabbix started as an internal software project in 1998. After three years, in 2001, it was released to the public under GPL,[4] three years later until the first stable version, 1.0, was released in 2004.

Zabbix 2.4 Dashboard page
Dashboard of the Zabbix 3.0.0 release
Timeline of major releases
DateReleaseEnd of Full Support (3 years)End of Limited Support (5 years)
Zabbix 1.0
1998 Zabbix started as an internal project in a bank by Alexei Vladishev[4] - -
7 Apr 2001 Zabbix 1.0alpha1 is released as GPL[5] - -
23 Mar 2004 Zabbix 1.0 released[6] -
Zabbix 1.x
6 Feb 2006 Zabbix 1.1 released[6] - -
29 May 2007 Zabbix 1.4 released[6] - -
11 Sep 2008 Zabbix 1.6 released[6] - -
7 Dec 2009 Zabbix 1.8 released[6] - -
Zabbix 2.x
21 May 2012 Zabbix 2.0 Long Term Support (LTS) released[6] August 2015 [7] August 2017 [7]
12 November 2013 Zabbix 2.2 LTS released[6] August 2017 [7] August 2019 [7]
11 Sep 2014 Zabbix 2.4 released[6] - -
Zabbix 3.x
16 Feb 2016 Zabbix 3.0 LTS released[6] February 28, 2019 [7] February 28, 2021 [7]
14 Sep 2016 Zabbix 3.2 released[6] - -
22 Aug 2017 Zabbix 3.4 released[6] - -
Zabbix 4.x
1 Oct 2018 Zabbix 4.0 LTS released[8] October 31, 2021 [7] October 31, 2023 [7]
2 Apr 2019 Zabbix 4.2 released[9] - -
7 Oct 2019 Zabbix 4.4 released[10] May 31, 2020 [7] June 30, 2020 [7]
Zabbix 5.x
12 May 2020 Zabbix 5.0 LTS released[11] May 31, 2023 [7] May 31, 2025 [7]
26 Oct 2020 Zabbix 5.2 released[12] Apr 30, 2021 [7] May 31, 2021 [7]

Features
  • High performance, high capacity (able to monitor hundreds of thousands of devices).
  • Auto-discovery of servers and network devices and interfaces.[13]
  • Low-level discovery,[14] automatically starts monitoring new items, file systems or network interfaces among others.
  • Distributed monitoring with centralized web administration.
  • Native high performance agents (client software for Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, Tru64/OSF1, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7)
  • SLA, and ITIL KPI metrics on reporting.
  • High-level (business) view of monitored resources through user-defined visual console screens and dashboards.
  • Remote command execution through Zabbix proxies since August 2017,[15] up to Zabbix 3.4[16]
Architecture

Architecture

  • Agent or Agent-less monitoring capabilities.[17]
  • Web-based interface.[18]
  • Support for both polling and trapping mechanisms.

Monitoring

  • JMX monitoring.
  • Web monitoring.

Security and authentication

  • no audit log
  • Secure user authentication.
  • Flexible user permissions.

Notification capabilities

  • Flexible e-mail notification on predefined events.
  • Near-real-time notification mechanisms, for example using including XMPP protocol

Development

Zabbix is primarily developed by a Zabbix LLC company.

Source code

Zabbix consists of several separate modules:

  • Zabbix Server, not supported in Windows,[19] performs the polling and trapping of data, calculates triggers and sends notifications to users, needs a database to store configurations and data.
  • Zabbix Agents, installed on the system that is to be monitored to reach out values like CPU/memory usage that can only be accessed from within the OS
  • Zabbix Frontend, web front-end used for setup, configuration and data browsing.
  • Zabbix Proxy,[20] not supported in Windows, allows to access to systems that can't be reached directly and reduce load on Zabbix Server.[19]

While the server, proxy and agents are written in C, the front-end is implemented in PHP and JavaScript. A Java gateway is also available since Zabbix 2.0.

Releases

Since the first stable version was released as 1.0, Zabbix versioning has used minor version numbers to denote major releases. Each minor release actually implements many new features, while change level releases mostly introduce bugfixes.

Zabbix version numbering scheme has changed over time. While the first two stable branches were 1.0 and 1.1, after 1.1 it was decided to use odd numbers for development versions and even numbers for stable versions. As a result, 1.3 followed 1.1 as a development update to be released as 1.4.

See also

References
  1. "Release Notes for Zabbix 5.2.3".
  2. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/4.0/manual/config/templates
  3. List of supported databases in the manual
  4. Presentation, containing early history
  5. Freshmeat announcement page
  6. Zabbix release list
  7. https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  8. "Release Notes for Zabbix 4.0.0".
  9. "Release Notes for Zabbix 4.2.0".
  10. "Release Notes for Zabbix 4.4.0".
  11. "Release Notes for Zabbix 5.0.0".
  12. "Release Notes for Zabbix 5.2.0".
  13. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/discovery/low_level_discovery/network_interfaces
  14. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/discovery/low_level_discovery
  15. https://www.zabbix.com/rn/rn3.4.0
  16. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/3.4/manual/introduction/whatsnew340#remote_command_support_through_proxies
  17. https://www.zabbix.com/agentless_monitoring
  18. Di Francesco, Guillaume (28 November 2016). "Installation d'un serveur Zabbix 3.0.3" [Installing a Zabbix server 3.0.3] (html). Supinfo (in French). Retrieved 24 January 2020. En ce sens, Zabbix est une solution de supervision libre permettant de surveiller des systèmes et des services précis par la génération de graphiques.
  19. https://www.zabbix.com/requirements
  20. https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/manual/concepts/proxy

Further reading
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