What's New in Zabbix 4.4

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Next generation Zabbix Agent

Zabbix 4.4 introduces a new type of agent, zabbix_agent2, which offers a wide range of new capabilities and advanced monitoring functions:

• Written in Go language.
• Plugin framework for monitoring of various services and applications.
• Ability to maintain state between checks (for example, keeping persistent DB connections).
• Built-in scheduler to support flexible time intervals.
• Efficient network usage using bulk data transfer.
• Drop-in replacement of existing agents on Linux with more platforms to be supported soon.

For a complete list of new features check out the documentation.

NB! Existing Zabbix agent will still be supported.

Download

Webhooks and programmable logic for actions and notifications

Integration with external notification and ticketing systems was greatly improved by allowing to define all processing logic using the built-in JavaScript engine. This functionality streamlines two-way integration with external systems allowing one-click access from the Zabbix UI to a case in your ticketing system, generated message in chat, and more.

Read more

Setting standards for Zabbix templates

We introduced a set of standards and well-defined guidelines for templates. It is crucial to have common ground for all creators and maintainers of templates and also for all Zabbix users.

Structure of XML/JSON files was greatly simplified to enable manual editing of templates using just a text editor. Most of the existing templates were improved to match new standards

Official support of TimescaleDB

In addition to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and DB2, we now officially support TimescaleDB. TimescaleDB provides nearly linear level of performance, as well as automated instant removal of older historical data and generally easier maintenance compared to traditional relational databases.

Check our blog post for a quick performance comparison with PostgreSQL.

Knowledge base for items and triggers

Zabbix 4.4 offers a much more visible description of items and triggers. This information provides tremendous help to engineers giving them all possible details about meaning and purpose of collected items, problem details and resolution instructions for triggers etc.

Advanced visualization options

Dashboards and associated widgets were improved in a number of ways streamlining their creation and management, and adding the ability to modify widget parameters with just one mouse click. Dashboard grid is now perfectly sized to support ultra-wide screens and large screen walls.

Problem view widget was enhanced to support aggregated view, a new widget to display graph prototypes was introduced as well.

In addition to that all widgets can now be displayed in header-less mode.

Bar graphs and aggregation

Zabbix 4.4 comes stock with bar graphs and graph widget now supports data aggregation using various aggregate functions. These two features combined make long term data analysis and capacity planning a lot easier.

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Official support of new platforms

In addition to existing official packages and appliances, Zabbix 4.4 now also caters to the following platforms:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
• Debian 10
• Raspbian 10
• Mac OS/X
• RHEL 8
• MSI for Windows Agent

See all available platforms in Download section.

One-click cloud deployments

Zabbix can be easily deployed as a container or as a ready to use image for various cloud providers:

• AWS
• Azure
• Google Cloud Platform
• Digital Ocean
• Docker

Secure auto-registration

New release of Zabbix enables optional PSK encryption for auto-registration with automatic encryption settings for added hosts. Now you can setup Zabbix to allow auto-registration of network devices only with PSK, only unencrypted or both.

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Advanced JSONPath for preprocessing

Zabbix now supports advanced syntax for JSONPath that allows complex preprocessing of JSON data including aggregation and search. Preprocessing can also be used for low-level discovery that makes it an extremely powerful tool for automation and discovery.

Descriptions for user macros

User macros is a very nice functionality that simplifies configuration of Zabbix and makes massive configuration changes a breeze. Support of descriptions for user macros will help to document the purpose of each macro making management of macros much easier.

More efficient advanced data collection

Data collection and discovery of WMI, JMX and ODBC related items was improved by new checks returning arrays of objects in JSON format. We’ve also added support of VMWare datastores for VMWare monitoring and systemd services for Linux platform, as well as new preprocessing type for CSV to JSON conversion.