Zabbix

Zabbix
Zabbix 3.0 dashboard
Developer(s) Zabbix LLC
Initial release April 2001 (2001-04)
Stable release
4.0 LTS[1] / October 1, 2018 (2018-10-01)
Preview release
3.4.2rc1 / September 14, 2017 (2017-09-14)
Repository
Edit this at Wikidata
Written in C (server, proxy, agent), PHP (frontend), Java (Java gateway)
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Network management system
License GNU General Public License version 2
Website www.zabbix.com


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 contains 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.

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.

Dashboard of the Zabbix 3.4.0 release, dark theme
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 [8]
November 12, 2013 Zabbix 2.2 LTS released[6] August, 2017 [9] August, 2019 [10]
11 Sep 2014 Zabbix 2.4 released[6] - -
Zabbix 3.x
16 Feb 2016 Zabbix 3.0 LTS released[6] February, 2019 [11] February, 2021 [12]
14 Sep 2016 Zabbix 3.2 released[6] - -
22 Aug 2017 Zabbix 3.4 released[6] - -

Features

Architecture
  • High performance, high capacity (able to monitor hundreds of thousands of devices).
  • Auto-discovery of servers and network devices.
  • Low-level discovery.
  • 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 [13], up to Zabbix 3.4[14]

Architecture

  • Agent-less monitoring.
  • Web-based interface.
  • Support for both polling and trapping mechanisms.

Monitoring

  • JMX monitoring.
  • Web monitoring.

Security and authentication

  • 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

Dashboard of the Zabbix 3.0.0 release
Zabbix 2.4 Dashboard page

Zabbix is primarily developed by a Zabbix LLC company.

Source code

Zabbix consists of several separate modules:

  • Zabbix Server, not supported in Windows[15], written in C performs the polling and trapping of data, calculates triggers and sends notifications to users, needs a Database to store configurations and data.
  • Zabbix Agents
  • Zabbix Frontend, web frontend written in php.
  • Zabbix Proxy, not supported in Windows[16]

While the server, proxy and agents are written in C, the frontend is implemented in PHP and Javascript, also a Java gateway, available since Zabbix 2.0, is written in Java.

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 release to be released as 1.4.

Timeline

Note: this chart excludes release candidates in stable branches.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Release Notes for Zabbix".
  2. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/4.0/manual/config/templates
  3. ↑ List of supported databases in the manual
  4. 1 2 Presentation, containing early history
  5. ↑ Freshmeat announcement page
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Zabbix release list
  7. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  8. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  9. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  10. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  11. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  12. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy
  13. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/rn/rn3.4.0
  14. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/3.4/manual/introduction/whatsnew340#remote_command_support_through_proxies
  15. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/requirements
  16. ↑ https://www.zabbix.com/requirements

Further reading

  • (2010) Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring - Packt Publishing ISBN 978-1-84719-768-9
  • (2013) Mastering Zabbix - Packt Publishing ISBN 978-1-78328-349-1
  • (2015) Zabbix Cookbook - Packt Publishing
  • (2015) Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials - Packt Publishing
  • (2016) Zabbix Network Monitoring - Second Edition - Packt Publishing ISBN 9781782161288
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.