10 Upgrade notes for 7.2.0

These notes are for upgrading from Zabbix 7.0.x to Zabbix 7.2.0.

All notes are grouped into:

• Breaking changes - changes that may break existing installations and other critical information related to the upgrade process
• Other - all remaining information describing the changes in Zabbix functionality

See also:

• Upgrade procedure for all relevant information about upgrading from versions before Zabbix 7.0.0;
• Upgrading HA cluster for instructions on upgrading servers in a high-availability (HA) cluster.

Upgrade process

To complete a 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:

mysql> SET GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators = 1;

Once the upgrade has been successfully completed, this option can be disabled:

mysql> SET GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators = 0;

Breaking changes

Oracle DB dropped

The support for Oracle as a backend database, deprecated since Zabbix 7.0, has been removed.

Escaping of backslashes in history function parameters

Proper escaping of backslashes has been added in history function string parameters since Zabbix 7.0.0.

As additional backslashes are added during the upgrade from pre-7.0 Zabbix versions, this leads to longer parameters which may result in broken trigger functions if the parameter length exceeds the maximum data size of 255 characters.

To avoid this problem it is suggested to manually move long parameters into user macros before the upgrade.

Note that since Zabbix 7.2.5 additional checks for the resulting parameter length have been added for upgrades from pre-7.0 Zabbix versions. If the resulting length exceeds the maximum size, such parameters are not upgraded while printing a warning in the logs asking users to fix the listed parameters manually.

See also escaping-related upgrade issues.

Frontend file directory changed during package installation

The frontend file directory has been moved from /usr/share/zabbix to /usr/share/zabbix/ui.

Note that during the upgrade the web server configuration file, if it contains custom changes (typically with Nginx), will not be automatically overwritten with the updated file containing the new paths. You will need to back up the old config file and then overwrite the old config file with the new one, for example, on RedHat based systems:

cp /etc/nginx/conf.d/zabbix.conf.rpmnew /etc/nginx/conf.d/zabbix.conf

and then edit the updated configuration file (/etc/nginx/conf.d/zabbix.conf) manually to restore the old configuration.

Repository structure

Zabbix repository now contains Zabbix package files in the folders .../7.2/stable/ (released versions) and .../7.2/unstable/ (pre-release packages for alpha, beta, and release candidate versions) instead of .../7.1/ for unstable versions and .../7.2/ for stable versions.

The zabbix-release packages, which can be used for both stable and unstable releases, are provided separately in the 7.2/release folder.

For 7.2 and newer versions, packages from the non-supported folder are moved to the third-party folder, which now contains customized packages for RHEL and its derivative distributions.

A new key B5333005 is used to sign everything, except for zabbix-tools repo, which has its own dedicated zabbix-tools key.

Loadable plugin executables relocated

When upgrading Zabbix agent 2 from packages, loadable plugin executables are moved to a new location - from /usr/sbin/zabbix-agent2-plugin to /usr/libexec/zabbix (for SLES, /usr/lib/zabbix).

After upgrading, you may need to update any previously modified plugin configuration files to reflect the new location. For example, update the MSSQL plugin Plugins.MSSQL.System.Path parameter to /usr/libexec/zabbix/zabbix-agent2-plugin-mssql.

auth API property dropped

The support for the auth API property, deprecated since Zabbix 6.4, has been removed. For alternative API authorization methods, see Authentication. For other API changes, see Appendix 2. Changes from 7.0 to 7.2.

Items turn unsupported with no pollers configured

A check for poller has been added when an item is added to configuration cache and when item type changes. This check has been added for agent, SNMP agent, HTTP agent, browser, script, JMX monitoring, ODBC monitor, and IPMI items.

If no pollers are configured, the items will turn unsupported instead of being simply ignored. This change does not affect item behavior when executed manually ("Test item") or script execution.

Other

Naming

When configuring an item history widget:

• Columns parameter has been renamed to Items
• Data column in the selected item list has been renamed to Item

Data overview widget migrated to Top items

A new Top items widget has been added, replacing the functionality of the deprecated Data overview widget. Existing Data overview widgets will be migrated to Top items.

Note that if previously the Max number of columns and rows in overview tables value was set above 100 in Administration -> General -> GUI, now host/item value records will be limited to 100.

Low-level discovery

The performance of low-level discovery has been improved, as a result of which the previous limits of 29999 dependent items per master item and 3 dependency levels have been removed.