These notes are for upgrading from Zabbix 6.4.x to Zabbix 7.0.0. All notes are grouped into:
Critical
- the most critical information related to the upgrade process and the changes in Zabbix functionalityInformational
- all remaining information describing the changes in Zabbix functionalityIt is possible to upgrade to Zabbix 7.0.0 from versions before Zabbix 6.4.0. See the upgrade procedure section for all relevant information about upgrading from previous Zabbix versions.
To complete successful Zabbix server upgrade on MySQL/MariaDB, you may require to set GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators = 1
in MySQL if binary logging is enabled, there are no superuser privileges and log_bin_trust_function_creators = 1
is not set in MySQL configuration file.
To set the variable using the MySQL console, run:
Once the upgrade has been successfully completed, this option can be disabled:
To complete successful Zabbix server upgrade on MySQL and MariaDB, you may require to set GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators = 1
in MySQL if binary logging is enabled, there are no superuser privileges and log_bin_trust_function_creators = 1
is not set in MySQL configuration file.
To set the variable using the MySQL console, run:
Once the upgrade has been successfully completed, log_bin_trust_function_creators
can be disabled:
Upgrading to Zabbix 7.0.1 (or later) from Zabbix 7.0.0 with PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB results in a server crash. This issue is caused by a workaround to a compression job issue in the auditlog table in Zabbix 7.0 that irreversibly changes the compression policy of the auditlog table. See known issues for details of fixing the auditlog table manually.
If you have not upgraded to Zabbix 7.0.0 yet, note that there should be no such issues for upgrades from pre-7.0 Zabbix versions to 7.0.1. Follow the instructions in TimescaleDB setup page configuration section "For existing installations".
The default location where Zabbix agent on Windows looks for the configuration file has been changed. Now the agent searches for it in the directory where the agent binary zabbix_agentd.exe is located (instead of C:\zabbix_agentd.conf
, as previously).
Zabbix agent 2 on Windows already searched for the default configuration file in the directory where the binary zabbix_agent2.exe is located. However, in the new version the agent 2 expects the configuration file to be named zabbix_agent2.conf
(instead of zabbix_agent2.win.conf
)
See also: Installing Zabbix agent on Windows.
Empty values are now allowed in plugin-related configuration parameters on Zabbix agent 2.
Support of TimescaleDB 1.x has been removed.
Prior to upgrading to Zabbix 7.0.0, it is necessary to manually upgrade TimescaleDB to use double precision data types if TimescaleDB is used with compression. You can tell if TimescaleDB is not using double precision data types by the warning in the System information frontend section or Zabbix server log: "Database is not upgraded to use double precision values. Support for the old numeric type will be removed in future versions."
For more information, see Old numeric (float) value type dropped.
The auditlog
table has been converted to hypertable on TimescaleDB in new installations.
To successfully upgrade existing installations, you must rerun the `timescaledb.sql`` script, located in database/postgresql, before starting Zabbix server. Zabbix server will log a warning, if started without running this script first.
See also: TimescaleDB setup.
Proxy records have been moved out of the hosts
table and are now stored in the new proxy
table.
Also, operational data of proxies (such as last access, version, compatibility) have been moved out of the host_rtdata
table and is now stored in the new proxy_rtdata
table.
Based on the changes to item timeout configuration, both ODBC login timeout and query execution timeout for database monitor items are now limited to the Timeout parameter value set in the item configuration form.
Previously each network discovery rule would be processed by one discoverer process. Thus all service checks within the rule were performed sequentially.
In the new version the network discovery process has been reworked to allow concurrency between service checks. A new discovery manager process has been added along with a configurable number of discovery workers (or threads). The discovery manager processes discovery rules and creates a discovery job per each rule with tasks (service checks). The service checks are picked up and performed by the discovery workers. Only those checks that have the same IP and port are scheduled sequentially because some devices may not allow concurrent connections on the same port. A new zabbix[discovery_queue] internal item allows to monitor the number of discovery checks in the queue.
The StartDiscoverers parameter now determines the total number of available discovery workers for discovery. The default number of StartDiscoverers has been upped from 1 to 5, and the range from 0-250 to 0-1000. The discoverer
processes from previous Zabbix versions have been dropped.
Additionally, the number of available workers per each rule is now configurable in the frontend. This parameter is optional. During the upgrade it will be set to "One" as in previous Zabbix versions.
See the list of API changes in Zabbix 7.0.0.
The minimum required PHP version has been raised from 7.4.0 to 8.0.0.
The default width has been increased 3 times for all widgets. Note that if you are using custom widgets, you may have to update the respective parameters of the manifest.json file (for example, when configuring a customized Clock widget, width
is to be changed from 4
to 12
).
A widget may now be up to 72 columns in width (previously 24) and 1 to 64 rows in height (previously 2 to 32). The dashboard can therefore now hold up to 72 widgets horizontally.
The new Item history dashboard widget has replaced the Plain text widget, offering several improvements.
Unlike the Plain Text widget, which only displayed the latest item data in plain text, the Item History widget supports various display options for multiple item types (numeric, character, log, text, and binary). For example, it can show progress bars or indicators, images for binary data types (useful for browser items), and highlight text values (useful for log file monitoring). For more information, see Item history.
After the upgrade, all previously configured Plain text widgets will be automatically replaced with Item history widgets, retaining the same configuration settings. However, any API scripts referencing the Plain Text widget must be updated manually.
In Zabbix 7.0.4, the behavior of resolving the macros {HOST.CONN}
, {HOST.DNS}
, {HOST.IP}
, {EVENT.CAUSE.*}
, {EVENT.TAGS.*}
, and {EVENT.SYMPTOMS}
has been corrected for consistency with other built-in macros. Now, they will resolve to *UNKNOWN*
if an error occurs while evaluating their value.
As a result of this change, to ensure proper functionality, it is necessary to update the media types for the following integrations: iTop, Jira Service Desk, ManageEngine ServiceDesk, SolarWinds Service Desk.
This change may also affect any custom scripts or integrations using the abovementioned macros.
After the upgrade all agent and HTTP agent checks will be moved to asynchronous pollers.
Previously cURL library features were detected at build time of Zabbix server, proxy or agent. If cURL features were upgraded, to make use of them the respective Zabbix component had to be recompiled.
Now only a restart is required for upgraded cURL library features to become available in Zabbix. Recompilation is no longer required. This is true for Zabbix server, proxy or agent.
In addition:
The support for Oracle as a backend database has been deprecated in Zabbix 7.0 and is expected to be completely removed in future versions.
A software update check is now added by default to new and existing installations - Zabbix frontend will communicate to the public Zabbix endpoint to check for updates.
You can disable this check by setting AllowSoftwareUpdateCheck=0 in server configuration.
Now, if a floating point value is received for an unsigned integer item, the value will be trimmed from the decimal part and saved as an integer. Previously a floating point value would make an integer item unsupported.
Time and date displays in the frontend now conform to the US standard date/time display when the default (en_US) frontend theme is used.
Before | Now |
---|---|
All icons in the frontend have been replaced by fonts.
In Monitoring → Latest data, the subfilter and data are no longer displayed by default if the filter is not set. Note, however, that previously saved filters that were set using only the subfilter remain unaffected. In such cases, the subfilter will remain visible, and data will be displayed even without the main filter being set.
Default value of the BufferSize configuration parameter for Zabbix agent 2 has been increased from 100 to 1000. This change does not affect installations where BufferSize is explicitly set.
Several aggregate functions have been updated. Now:
Since Zabbix 5.0.0, numeric (float) data type supports precision of approximately 15 digits and range from approximately -1.79E+308 to 1.79E+308. This is implemented by default in new installations. Whereas for upgrading existing installations that had been created before Zabbix 5.0 a database upgrade patch is applied automatically.
The patch will alter data columns of history and trends tables, which usually contain lots of data, therefore it is expected to take some time to complete. Since the exact estimate depends on server performance, database management system configuration and version, and it cannot be predicted, it is recommended to first test the patch outside the production environment, even though with MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.5 configured by default the patch is known to be executed instantly for large tables due to efficient algorithm and the fact that previously the same double type was used but with limited precision, meaning that data itself does not need to be modified.
If you use Oracle database or older version of MySQL database, as well as in case of large installations, the patch execution can take a lot of time, and therefore it is recommended to update the data type manually before starting the upgrade.
Please execute the appropriate patch (SQL file) for your database; you may find these scripts in the Zabbix Git repository for:
Important! Run these scripts for the server database only.
To apply a patch:
Note that with TimescaleDB the compression support must only be turned on after applying this patch.
The option to set the startup type of the Zabbix agent/agent 2 Windows service (-S --startup-type
) has been added. This option allows configuring the agent/agent 2 service to start automatically at Windows startup (automatic
), after the automatically started services have completed startup (delayed
), when started manually by a user or application (manual
) or to disable the service entirely (disabled
).
This section lists the changes to the stock templates that are shipped with Zabbix.
Upgrading to the latest Zabbix version will not automatically upgrade the templates used. It is suggested to modify the templates in existing installations by downloading the latest templates from the Zabbix Git repository and importing them manually into Zabbix. If templates with the same names already exist, the Delete missing options should be checked when importing to achieve a clean import. This way the old items that are no longer in the updated template will be removed (note that it will mean losing history of these old items).
mongodb.version
has been changed from Dependent item to Zabbix agent.oracle.version
has been changed from Dependent item to Zabbix agent.name
and fields
elements have been updated to reflect the replacement of the Plain text widget with the Item history widget.When installing Zabbix from packages and preparing the database schema, the location of database-related files has changed to better correspond to the file structure in the sources:
schema.sql
, data.sql
, images.sql
) are located at the root of the database directory.option-patches
directory.tsdb
has been replaced by timescaledb
.option-patches
directory includes with-compression
and without-compression
subdirectories; these contain optional files/patches for upgrading database tables depending on TimescaleDB compression settings.database/postgresql/timescaledb/schema.sql
.Below is a comparison of the previous and current directory structures for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
# Previous: # Current:
database database
├── mysql ├── mysql
│ ├── data.sql │ ├── option-patches
│ ├── double.sql │ │ ├── double.sql
│ ├── history_pk_prepare.sql │ │ └── history_pk_prepare.sql
│ ├── images.sql │ ├── data.sql
│ └── schema.sql │ ├── images.sql
│ │ └── schema.sql
│ │
├── postgresql ├── postgresql
│ ├── tsdb_history_pk_upgrade_no_compression │ ├── option-patches
│ │ ├── history_pk.sql │ │ ├── double.sql
│ │ ├── history_pk_log.sql │ │ └── history_pk_prepare.sql
│ │ ├── history_pk_str.sql │ ├── timescaledb
│ │ ├── history_pk_text.sql │ │ ├── option-patches
│ │ └── history_pk_uint.sql │ │ │ ├── with-compression
│ ├── tsdb_history_pk_upgrade_with_compression │ │ │ │ ├── history_pk.sql
│ │ ├── history_pk.sql │ │ │ │ ├── history_pk_log.sql
│ │ ├── history_pk_log.sql │ │ │ │ ├── history_pk_str.sql
│ │ ├── history_pk_str.sql │ │ │ │ ├── history_pk_text.sql
│ │ ├── history_pk_text.sql │ │ │ │ ├── history_pk_uint.sql
│ │ └── history_pk_uint.sql │ │ │ │ └── trends_upgrade.sql
│ ├── data.sql │ │ │ └── without-compression
│ ├── double.sql │ │ │ ├── history_pk.sql
│ ├── history_pk_prepare.sql │ │ │ ├── history_pk_log.sql
│ ├── images.sql │ │ │ ├── history_pk_str.sql
│ ├── schema.sql │ │ │ ├── history_pk_text.sql
│ └── timescaledb.sql │ │ │ ├── history_pk_uint.sql
│ │ │ │ └── trends_upgrade.sql
│ │ │ └── schema.sql
│ │ ├── data.sql
│ │ ├── images.sql
│ │ └── schema.sql
├── ... ├── ...
Please update your scripts, if any, containing the previous directory structure.
Upon upgrade, global timeouts for all supported item types will be set based on the Timeout
parameter value from the server configuration file. If a proxy is configured, then, by default, it will use the server's global timeout settings.
When using an upgraded server (version 7.0.0 or newer) with an older proxy or agent, the proxy or agent will work as before:
Timeout
parameter from the proxy configuration file;Timeout
parameter from the agent configuration file.The timeout parameters have been removed from the configuration files of Modbus and MQTT plugins. The request execution timeouts can now be set using the item configuration form.
A new item type - Browser item - has been added to Zabbix, enabling the monitoring of complex websites and web applications using a browser. Browser items allow the execution of user-defined JavaScript code to simulate browser-related actions such as clicking, entering text, navigating through web pages, etc.
Additionally, this feature adds the following changes:
StartBrowserPollers
and WebDriverURL
Zabbix server/proxy configuration file parameters have been added;-w <webdriver url>
command-line parameter for enabling browser monitoring has been added to the zabbix_js
command-line utility.The wmi.get and wmi.getall used with Zabbix agent 2 now return JSON with boolean values represented as strings (for example, "RealTimeProtectionEnabled": "True"
instead of "RealTimeProtectionEnabled": true
returned previously) to match the output format of these items on Zabbix agent.
For the list of item changes that do no break compatibility, see What's new in Zabbix 7.0.0.
Zabbix now can read SNMP trap files from the correct place in case the active node is switched in a high-availability setup.
However, for this functionality to work it is required to update the time format in any bash, perl and SNMPTT scripts to "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z" (i.e. 2024-01-10T11:56:14+0300
).