Technical

The 2.0.4 release contains a lot of improvements so one tiny change may have passed unnoticed: the version of the API has been bumped to 2.0.4 as well. Indeed, that’s one small change in the code, but a huge decision for the Zabbix developers team. The API version has remained on 1.4 since the release […]

The Zabbix API is a great tool, which allows you to extend and tailor Zabbix to your specific needs. Yet using it still poses a challenge for many developers, because a lot of it is still undocumented. To solve this problem and make the API more open to third party developers we’ve decided to completely […]

Introduction JMX monitoring with Zabbix is easy using Zabbix Java gateway. Let’s say you have a JMX-enabled Java application running on some host. You start the Java gateway, configure Zabbix server to use that, add that host in Zabbix frontend, set up a JMX interface and create a JMX agent item (described here). A JMX item key […]

For quite some time now Zabbix has been offering a virtual appliance for those who would like to try it out or have a simple deployment for a small environment. Among other virtualisation solutions, users also run it on VirtualBox. But, when using NAT in VirtualBox, the host of the virtual machine cannot connect to […]

Often host level maintenance is too much. Picture a machine running multiple services: While one service has a scheduled downtime, others continue their work and you want to be alarmed about them. Zabbix has no maintenance on trigger level at present, but you can work around it quite easily.

Zabbix API starts to play significant role especially when it comes to integration of Zabbix with third-party software like configuration and incident management systems as well as for automation of routine tasks. It is incredibly difficult to manage monitoring of thousands of hosts without some automation in place.

The performance of Zabbix is being constantly improved, and there were significant performance improvements back in 1.8. Then pretty much every Zabbix 1.8 series release added some more benefits, reduced database access and so on. With the 2.0 release there are more performance benefits expected, but there’s so little time to gather some information… luckily, […]

This came as the first assignment for me, a new Zabbix employee – to fix a bug ZBX-3788 zabbix daemon processes hang on futex Sometimes terminating a Zabbix agent with “killall -15 zabbix_agentd” resulted in one hanging process and other processes in the <defunct> state. strace utility showed the process was hanging on futex: Process […]

Everything in the world of electronics gets smaller, while performance continues to grow. I know I should not compare those computers from 1960 with what we have now, but I still get amazed all the time. The thing about modern computers is that sometimes it is a waste of resources to see them using a small […]

So far, upgrading from one development 1.9 release or 2.0.0 release candidate to another was not officially supported. Only unofficial patches and only for MySQL were available. Starting  with 2.0.0rc3, all database upgrades for all supported databases will be fully supported. This should be great news for those who would like to do extended testing, […]

Zabbix agent currently supports only one server in active mode – the first host from the Server configuration parameter is used. While for most users that is enough, some installations require a more advanced approach with the agent being able to report to multiple servers in the active mode.

While it is possible to monitor various aspects of virtual environments with current versions of Zabbix, it does require some time to set it all up and isn’t as integrated as it could be. A more integrated experience for virtual environment monitoring is currently being considered for development. It might cover VMware, Xen, KVM (and […]