The Zabbix team is happy to announce the release of Zabbix 4.4. The latest version comes with a new Zabbix agent written in Go, sets the standard for Zabbix templates, and provides advanced visualization capabilities.
Let's take a look at the most important features included in Zabbix 4.4.
Zabbix next generation agent
Zabbix 4.4 introduces a new agent type, zabbix_agent2, which offers a wide range of new features and advanced monitoring features:
- Written in the Go language.
- Plugin framework for monitoring various services and applications.
- The ability to maintain state between checks (for example, maintain persistent database connections).
- Built-in scheduler to support flexible time slots.
- Efficient use of the network by transferring large amounts of data.
- At the moment, the agent works on Linux, but we will make it available for other platforms in the near future.
β For a complete list of new features, see
NB! The existing Zabbix agent will still be supported.
β
Webhooks and programmable action/notification logic
Significantly improved integration with external notification and ticketing systems, which made it possible to define the entire processing logic using the built-in JavaScript engine. This functionality simplifies two-way integration with external systems, allowing one-click access from the Zabbix UI to an entry in your ticket system, generating chat messages, and more.
Setting standards for Zabbix templates
We have introduced a number of standards and well-defined for creating templates.
The structure of the XML/JSON files has been greatly simplified, allowing templates to be edited manually using only a text editor. Most of the existing templates have been improved to bring them in line 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 as well as automated instant deletion of old historical data.
we compared performance with PostgreSQL.
Knowledge base on items and triggers
Zabbix 4.4 offers a much more visual description of items and triggers. This information is of great help to engineers, providing them with every possible detail about the meaning and purpose of the collected items, details of the problem, and instructions on how to fix it.
Advanced visualization options
Toolbars and their associated widgets have been enhanced in many ways to make them easier to create and manage, as well as the ability to change widget settings with a single click. The dashboard grid size is now appropriate to support ultra-wide screens and large screens.
The problem display widget has been enhanced to support an aggregated view, and a new widget has been introduced to display graph prototypes.
In addition, now all widgets can be displayed in a mode without titles.
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 greatly facilitates long-term data analysis and capacity planning.
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Official support for new platforms
Zabbix 4.4 now works on the following platforms:
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
- Debian 10
- Raspbian 10
- RHEL8
- Agent for Mac OS/X
- MSI Agent for Windows
All available platforms can be found in .
One-click cloud installation
Zabbix can be easily installed as a container or as a 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 you to use PSK encryption for automatic registration with automatic encryption settings for added hosts. You can now configure Zabbix to allow automatic registration of network devices with PSK only, plain text only, or both.
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Extended JSONPath for Preprocessing
Zabbix now supports extended JSONPath syntax which allows for complex pre-processing of JSON data, including aggregation and searching. Preprocessing can also be used for low-level discovery, making it an extremely powerful tool for automation and discovery.
User Macro Descriptions
User macros are a very nice feature that simplifies the Zabbix configuration and makes it much easier to make changes to the configuration. Support for custom macro descriptions will help document the purpose of each macro, making it much easier to manage them.
More efficient advanced data collection
Data collection and object discovery 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 Datastores for VMWare monitoring and systemd services for the Linux platform, as well as a new preprocessing type for converting CSV to JSON.
Other new and improved features of Zabbix 4.4
- Preprocessing XML data from LLD
- The maximum number of dependent metrics (dependent items) has been increased to 10 thousand pieces
- Added automatic type conversion to JSONPath preprocessing
- Hostname included in real-time export files
- Windows agent now supports performance counters in English
- Ability to ignore values ββin preprocessing on errors
- Latest data has been expanded to provide access not only to historical data, but also to operational data
- Removed the ability to edit trigger descriptions, greatly simplified access to them
- Removed support for built-in Jabber and Eztexting media types, using web hooks or external scripts instead
- Updated default dashboard
- Auto-registered hosts now have the ability to specify the option "connect to dns" or "connect to IP"
- Added support for {EVENT.ID} macro for trigger URL
- The screen element "Screen" is no longer supported
- The last dashboard widget type created is remembered and reused later
- Widget title visibility is configurable per widget
The full list of new features in Zabbix 4.4 can be found in .
Source: habr.com