The open monitoring system Zabbix 7.0 was released, which is classified as a version with an extended period of official support (LTS). Zabbix is a universal system for monitoring the performance and availability of servers, engineering and network equipment, applications, databases, virtualization systems, containers, IT services, web services, and cloud infrastructure.
The system implements a full cycle from collecting data, processing and transforming it, analyzing this data to detect problems, and ending with storing this data, visualizing and sending alerts using escalation rules. The system also provides flexible options for expanding data collection and alerting methods, as well as automation capabilities through a powerful API. A single web interface implements centralized management of monitoring configurations and role-based distribution of access rights to various user groups.
Starting from version 7.0, the project code is distributed under the AGPLv3 license, instead of the GPLv2 license. A feature of the AGPLv3 license is the introduction of additional restrictions for applications that provide the functioning of network services. When using AGPL components in the operation of network services, the developer is obliged to provide the user with the source code of all changes made to these components, even if the software underlying the service is not distributed and is used exclusively in the internal infrastructure to organize the operation of the service. In addition, the AGPLv3 license is only compatible with GPLv3, which leads to a licensing conflict with applications distributed under the GPLv2 license, for example, delivery of a library under AGPLv3 requires all applications using this library to distribute code under the AGPLv3 or GPLv3 license.
Official packages are prepared for Linux-Alma distributions Linux, CentOS, Debian, OpenSUSE, Oracle Linux, Raspberry Pi OS, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu; virtualization systems based on VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, XEN; Docker; OpenStack Nova. Zabbix can be quickly installed on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, IBM/RedHat Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Yandex Cloud. To migrate from earlier versions, you only need to install new binaries (Server and proxy) and a new interface (Zabbix will automatically perform the update procedure, no installation of new agents is required).
Major improvements in version 7.0 LTS:
- A mode of synthetic monitoring of sites and web applications using a browser engine and using complex scripts. It is possible to create screenshots of the site's state, visualize performance, and extract and monitor data specific to web applications.
- Support for proxy clusters, load balancing across multiple servers and the use of load balancers to ensure highly available Zabbix configurations. Scaling of existing Zabbix-based solutions is supported by deploying additional proxy servers.
- The performance and efficiency of the proxy has been increased by storing collected metrics in RAM without intermediate storage on disk. It is possible to use a hybrid scheme in which data is buffered in memory but also stored on disk.
- The scalability and speed of data collection have been increased - metrics are now polled in asynchronous mode, in which the next metric can be requested without waiting for the previous request to be processed. Each poller supports up to 1000 parallel checks. Asynchronous polling can be applied to agents and handlers that use SNMP and HTTP.
- Centralized timeout settings are provided, accessible through the GUI and API, and allowing you to define individual timeouts in relation to specific elements or override timeouts at the proxy level.
- New widgets have been added for visualizing metrics and infrastructure status (“Host navigator”, “Honeycomb”, “Pie chart”, “Gauge”, “Top triggers”, “Item history”). Dynamic widget navigation in dashboard mode has been implemented, using widget interactions to influence actions on one widget on others (for example, information about the host selected in one widget can be shown on widgets that visualize a geographic location). Also added is the ability to automatically update widgets when the data source changes. All widgets can be used for host templates. Many widgets now support aggregate values.
- The speed of determining the availability of hosts in networks has been significantly increased (10-100 times) due to parallelization of checks.
- Added support for two-factor authentication using one-time passwords (TOTP, Time-Based One-Time Password).
- Added checking the correctness of configuration files.
- Increased flexibility for host discovery in complex environments such as VMware and Kubernetes.
- Frontend performance has been improved by changing the logic for checking access rights.
- Most of the forms have been converted to work in modal mode.
- An instant response to the transfer of monitoring elements to maintenance is provided.
- Added ready-made templates and handlers for NextCloud, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure Cost Management, Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB, Amazon Elastic Container, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft SQL, CheckPoint Quantum Security Gateway, Fortinet FortiGate, HPE iLO, Cisco SD-WAN, HashiCorp Nomad, PostgreSQL (ODBC), OpenStack Nova, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, YugabyteDB, Ansible Webhook, Mantis Bug Tracker.
- Integration is provided with support service platforms Jira, Jira ServiceDesk, Redmine, ServiceNow, Zendesk, OTRS, Zammad, Solarwinds Service Desk, TOPdesk, SysAid, iTOP, ManageEngine Service Desk, user notification systems Slack, Pushover, Discord, Telegram, VictorOps, Microsoft Teams , SINGNL4, Mattermost, OpsGenie, PagerDuty, iLert, Signal, Express.ms, Rocket.Chat. There are over 500 templates and integrations available.
- DNS monitoring capabilities have been significantly expanded.
- Sending automatically generated PDF reports has been transferred to the stable category. Support for multi-page dashboards has been implemented for PDF reports.
- The ability to stream for sending metrics and events to external systems has been stabilized.
- Added the ability to pause data collection from lost items during auto-detection.
- Added support for webhooks tags for internal events.
- Implemented detection of engineID duplicates during SNMP monitoring.
- Added the ability to use user input when executing scripts.
- Improved communication protocol between all Zabbix components
- The ability to use custom macros in element names has been returned.
- Added support for macro functions for all built-in macros.
- Added history.push method. Support for jsonpath and xmlpath trigger functions has been implemented.
- Added the ability to execute scripts on the active agent.
- Support for binary data type and new trigger functions has been implemented.
- Work with data from Prometheus has been significantly accelerated.
Source: opennet.ru
