Zabbix Wiki

• XML export fixes.
• Web monitoring item permissions fixed.
• Templates themselves are disabled now in template linking popup.
• Discovered IPv6 hosts will now have colons replaced with underscores in hostnames.
• Fixed resetting user password when updating user details and HTTP auth is used.
• Maintenance period evaluation fixes.
• Graph preview fixes.
• Made more frontend strings translatable.
• Fixed possibility to create a host and a template with the same name.
• Circular template linkage checks improved.
• Fixed vertical text rendering with some fonts.
• Fixed time slider not sticking to “now” in many places.
• Fixed Zabbix agent compilation on AIX 5.1/5.2.
• Several SLA displaying fixes.
• Returned ability to pass dashes in user parameter key parameters and use them in key names.
• Several MSIE specific frontend fixes.
• Several fixes to trigger dependencies in templates.
• Removed mbstring overload requirement.
• Changed script execution from the frontend to close a security hole.
• Improve performance, reduce memory usage and reduce amount of SQL queries in several frontend sections (in screens, graphs and other locations).
• Permission fixes for distributed environments.
• Translation updates, including Brazilian Portuguese.
• Fixed possibility for a node to be silently deleted if it is removed, then re-added with the same ID.
• Several fixes to graph y axis scale calculation.
• OpenBSD compilation fixes.
• Fixed map editing if no images are available.
• Node synchronisation speed improved.
• Dashboard widget fixes, including widget refresh and favourites controls.
• Server and proxy gained support of LogSlowQueries option to help with debugging.
• Frontend requirement checks reviewed and new ones added.
• Fixed macro usage in simple check parameters.
• Fixed excessive decimal places in frontend values.
• Fixed element sorting in several locations in frontend.
• Fixed profile editing problems for Zabbix Admin users.
• Fixed syslog support (which was the oldest issue open so far).
• Improvements to fping/fping6 existence and functionality handling.
• Support for network map exporting and importing was added. Maps can now be exported from their configuration screen:

And on the same screen the import button can be found:

• Several frontend problems with Oracle database fixed.
• Fixed “Monitoring → Triggers” section showing triggers with dependencies in PROBLEM state.
• Fixed trigger expression evaluation.
• Fixed visual trigger editor not preserving element ordering.
• Changed escalations module to remove previous escalations for a trigger when adding new one. This will prevent neverending and immortal escalations from appearing.
• Added support for time shifting in trigger expressions.
• Fixed a memory leak in calculated item processing.

In total, 753 commits were made to the Zabbix repository in February.

• Replaced the Tree Top parser with a custom parser.
• Fixed user command loading after a valid login.
• Added Ctrl-d as a closing command.
• Add input verification for add user command.
• Several crashes upon incomplete input fixed.
• Fixed cases when both all and column name was specified.
• Fixed a crash upon receiving incorrect 'show' arguments.
• New help system with external XML source implemented.
• Reverted to readline input to solve performance problems.
• Fixed login command.
• Fixed delete user crash upon non-existent user or missing arguments.
• Fix complaints on blank input.
• Make add host working, add delete host.

In total, Zabcon repository received 27 commits in February.

Remember, Zabbix 1.8 was supposed to improve performance?

That's a nice promise, but what are users seeing in real production environments? Luckily, we know that now. Zabbix user verwilst has shared some graphs before and after upgrade from 1.6 (and he has a big monitor). Rough facts about the environment:

• over 1500 hosts;
• 125 000 items;
• 55 000 triggers;
• 1200+ new values per second.

This installation also has split Zabbix server and database.

And now for the shiny part. Here's a graph of SQL access by Zabbix server, split up by selects, inserts, updates and deletes. On the left hand side we can see Zabbix 1.6 operating, then there's a small gap during the upgrade, and then Zabbix 1.8.1 is getting to work.

MySQL queries. Click to see larger size

So what's the difference? As we can see, all kinds of database access have dropped notably. Selects, for example, dropped more than twice, updates a bit less than twice. What's significant, amount of inserts has dropped from significant 800 per second to pretty much nothing during a normal run (last value is 7.71), with insignificant, small peaks (all below 500). Amount of deletes does not seem to have changed that much.

Looking at the graph we can of course appreciate the improvements in the Zabbix server. We also can spot different things happening. The red risings are quite clearly housekeeper runs, where old data is removed. One run happens when Zabbix server starts, and then it runs once every hour - which is the default housekeeper interval.

There also are smaller bumps in inserts hourly. But these are not aligned with housekeeper runs, instead happening at full hour. These are trend calculations and inserts into the database. At the same time, updates slightly decrease because Zabbix server cache is busy by the trends.

So this single graph gives us both a confirmation that Zabbix server in version 1.8 is much more effective, as well as giving some insight in its daily (or more like hourly in this case) operations. But verwilst was so kind and shared some more graphs, showing the impact of the upgrade.

As a result of the reduced query count, actual load on servers dropped as well. Here we can see how CPU load stabilises on a lower level after the upgrade on the database host.

CPU load on Zabbix database. Click to see larger size

And here's CPU load change on the Zabbix server - excellent, that one also is lower with 1.8.

CPU load on Zabbix server. Click to see larger size

With all the load reduction, there might be some more “production like” metric we could look at, to determine what effect all this had on the efficiency of Zabbix after all. For that we have Zabbix server queue size - amount of items that are being worked on at any given moment. So here's the graph.

Zabbix queue size. Click to see larger size

Zabbix 1.6 had a lot of items to work on, and some notable backlog. Excluding some larger spikes, it seemed to fluctuate around 7 thousand items. As this value was updated less frequently, Zabbix graph has upgrade gap filled with straight line - it does not know what caused the missing data, and the amount of missing values is too small to consider that a gap. Upgrade period is marked on the graph for clarity.

Hey, what's that ? Is there some problem with Zabbix after the upgrade? Line seems to go too low… Now this is indeed a testimony to all the technical improvements we looked at. Actually Zabbix queue dropped from ~7000 to… 19.

So there. Zabbix 1.8 is better, faster, and it might even feed your dog. Confirmed by users.

Hooray, hooray, it's a(nother) bugfixing day. But this one is a bit special - the oldest open bug in the tracker, ZBX-3, has been fixed by Zabbix developer polymath. Created at 2007.08.26, it was more than two years old.

There recently have been some quite impressive improvements to node synchronisation (distributed monitoring cornerstone). First, Zabbix 1.8.1 improved single database index, which in a testing environment improved initial node synchronisation from approximately 15 minutes to one minute, 40 seconds (measuring time when node can resume communication with other hosts). Further code improvements brought this down to only 18 seconds.

These code changes so far are only available in SVN versions (or development snapshots). If you are interested in distributed monitoring, make sure to try this out and give some feedback.

If you were using distributed setup before version 1.8.1, make sure to change the index as instructed in 1.8.1 release notes.

In a similar vein, today there was another milestone - Zabbix bugtracker received its 2000th report in the ZBX project - the one used for problem reporting. While maybe not as great thing as 10000th commit, this nevertheless marks and shows Zabbix growth. Let's see how long this issue will survive unfixed.

BANG. At 2010-02-09 10:30:21, GMT+02 Zabbix repository received its 10000th commit. Committed by Zabbix server developer sasha, this further improved node synchronisation. Congratulations, Zabbix.

So you need some help or advice regarding Zabbix. Here are the possibilities of receiving one. To ensure you receive quality and timely help, follow some basic guidelines as well.

• Be polite;
• Make sure others can understand what you wrote. Avoid abbreviations, usually associated with texting.
• Be as specific as possible - if you are asking about some problem, specify Zabbix version. Usually it is also helpful to note database type and version. If asking about some feature, it is useful to explain what you have done to resolve it yourself. If this is related to some specific functionality that relies on 3rd party library, add information about library used and it's version (like net-snmp-5.4.2.1 or openipmi-2.0.16).

Look around this wiki. It has been split in multiple section to help you get started:

• Installation instructions;
• Further configuration instructions;
• Instructions for monitoring specific devices, applications etc;
• Technical documentation regarding internal details;
• If you have stumbled upon a problem not explained in the other sections, take a look at the troubleshooting pages.
• Contributed templates are collected in the templates section.
• There are also various scripts available for data gathering and Zabbix maintenance.

Zabbix forum has a large collection of valuable information and discussions. Feel free to open a new thread if you can't find an already existing one on the topic. Observe some basic guidelines:

• Use English (unless posting in a specific language subsection);
• Choose the correct forum section for your thread;
• If discussing a different problem than the one in the thread, open a new thread. If you have several unrelated questions, do not tuck them all in a single thread - it will be harder for you to receive help that way.

There is a channel, devoted to Zabbix discussion on the freenode network - #zabbix. Use one of the many IRC clients to connect. There are some IRC-specific guidelines:

• Do not ask to ask. There is no use to ask something like “can somebody help with something Zabbix related” - that's what the channel is there for. Additionally, this would require somebody to confirm, then you would ask the question, while you could have asked the actual question and received the answer already.
• Allow for some time to pass after asking the question. Do not assume that everybody in the channel is glued to the screen - there are real life duties and there are many different timezones. It might be middle of the night for somebody what is middle of the working day for you. There are also different holidays around the workd. Given these circumstances, it is suggested to stay at least 24 hours in the channel after asking the question.
• Do not repeat your question all the time, it will only get people annoyed. Having said that, repeating a question might be appropriate once a day if there have been no responses.

• Zabbix on MuckNet blog
• Zabbix on Pierky's blog
• Spanish Zabbix's Blog / Blog de Zabbix en español
• Блог о Zabbix на русском языке
• Zabbix on Kodai's blog in Japan