8 Running agent as root

Starting with version 5.0.0 the systemd service file for Zabbix agent in official packages was updated to explicitly include directives for User and Group. Both are set to zabbix.

This means that the old functionality of configuring which user Zabbix agent runs as via zabbix_agentd.conf file is bypassed and agent will always run as the user specified in the systemd service file.

To override this new behavior create a /etc/systemd/system/zabbix-agent.service.d/override.conf file with the following content:

[Service]
User=root
Group=root

Reload daemons and restart the zabbix-agent service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart zabbix-agent

For Zabbix agent2 this completely determines the user that it runs as.

For old agent this only re-enables the functionality of configuring user in the zabbix_agentd.conf file. Therefore in order to run zabbix agent as root you still have to edit the agent configuration file and specify User=root as well as AllowRoot=1 options.