The Zabbix team is pleased to announce the release of Zabbix 4.4. The latest version comes with a new Zabbix agent written in Go, sets standards for Zabbix templates, and provides enhanced visualization capabilities.
Let's take a look at the most important features included in Zabbix 4.4.
Next-generation Zabbix agent
Zabbix 4.4 introduces a new type of agent, zabbix_agent2, which offers a wide range of new capabilities and advanced monitoring features:
- Written in Go.
- A plugin framework for monitoring various services and applications.
- Ability to maintain state between checks (e.g., maintain persistent connections to databases).
- Built-in scheduler to support flexible time intervals.
- Efficient network usage through the transfer of large volumes of data.
- Currently, the agent runs on Linux, but we will soon make it available for other platforms.
→ For a complete list of new features, see
NB! The existing Zabbix agent will still be supported.
→
Webhooks and programmable action/notification logic
Significantly improved integration with external alerting and ticketing systems, allowing all processing logic to be defined using an embedded JavaScript engine. This functionality simplifies bidirectional integration with external systems, enabling one-click access from the Zabbix user interface to a record in your ticketing system, generating chat messages, and more.
Setting standards for Zabbix templates
We introduced a series of standards and clearly defined for creating templates.
The structure of XML/JSON files has been significantly simplified, allowing templates to be edited manually using only a text editor. Most existing templates have been upgraded to comply with the new standards.
Official support for TimescaleDB
In addition to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and DB2, we now officially support TimescaleDB. TimescaleDB provides near-linear performance levels as well as automated instant removal of old historical data.
we compared the performance with PostgreSQL.
Knowledge Base for Data Elements and Triggers
Zabbix 4.4 offers a much clearer description of data elements and triggers. This information is immensely helpful to engineers, providing them with all possible details about the meaning and purpose of collected items, the specifics of issues, and troubleshooting instructions.
Enhanced Visualization Features
Dashboards and their associated widgets have been improved in various ways, making their creation and management easier, and allowing widget parameters to be changed with a single click. The dashboard grid size now accommodates ultra-wide monitors and large screens.
The problem display widget has been enhanced to support aggregated views, and a new widget for displaying chart prototypes has been introduced.
Additionally, all widgets can now be displayed in headerless mode.
Histograms and Data Aggregation
Zabbix 4.4 supports histograms, and the graph widget can now aggregate data using various aggregate functions. The combination of these two features significantly simplifies long-term data analysis and capacity planning.
→
Official Support for New Platforms
Zabbix 4.4 now operates on the following platforms:
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
- Debian 10
- Raspbian 10
- RHEL 8
- Agent for Mac OS/X
- MSI Agent for Windows
All supported platforms can be found in the .
One-Click Cloud Installation
Zabbix can be easily installed as a container or ready-to-use disk image on various cloud services:
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
- Digital Ocean
- Docker
Reliable Automatic Registration
The new version of Zabbix allows for using PSK encryption for automatic registration with automatic encryption settings for added hosts. You can now configure Zabbix to allow automatic registration of network devices using PSK only, unencrypted only, or both methods.
→
Advanced JSONPath for Preprocessing
Zabbix now supports an extended JSONPath syntax that allows for complex JSON data preprocessing, including aggregation and searching. Preprocessing can also be used for low-level discovery, making it an extremely powerful tool for automation and monitoring.
User Macro Descriptions
User macros are a highly beneficial feature that simplifies Zabbix configuration and significantly eases changes to the configuration. The support for user macro descriptions will help document the purpose of each macro, greatly simplifying management.
More efficient enhanced data collection
Data collection and discovery of objects related to WMI, JMX, and ODBC have been improved with new checks that return arrays of objects in JSON format. We have also added support for VMWare data stores for monitoring VMWare and systemd services for Linux platforms, along with a new preprocessing type for converting CSV to JSON.
Other new features and enhancements in Zabbix 4.4
- XML data preprocessing from LLD
- The maximum number of dependent items has been increased to 10,000.
- Automatic type conversion has been added to JSONPath preprocessing.
- Hostnames are now included in real-time export files.
- The Windows agent now supports performance counters in English.
- The ability to ignore values in preprocessing on errors.
- Latest data has been expanded to provide access to both historical and operational data.
- The ability to edit trigger descriptions has been removed, significantly simplifying access to them.
- Support for embedded media types Jabber and Eztexting has been removed; webhooks or external scripts are now used instead.
- The default dashboard has been updated.
- Auto-registered hosts now have the option to connect via DNS or connect via IP.
- Support for the macro {EVENT.ID} has been added for trigger URLs.
- The screen item "Screen" is no longer supported.
- The last created dashboard widget type is remembered and reused thereafter.
- The visibility of widget headers is configurable for each widget
You can view the full list of new features in Zabbix 4.4 at .
Source: habr.com
