Standard Linux template upgrade 3.6 to 6.0 version issue

[NoOneIsPerfect]

Hi everyone

We are upgrading Zabbix 4.4 to 6.0. And currently we use an old 3.6 linux template.

Is there a way of gracefully upgrading this template to the latest 6.0 version?

I tried importing 4.0 version, it doen't want to upgrade existing template (shows error: template with the same name already exists).

Newer version templates (5.x and 6.x) simply import with other names, not asking for upgrade.

The main problem with the old template with 6.x version - it doesn't support deprecated macros in item names and show $2 and $3 instead of fs and interface names.

[tim.mooney]

I'm not aware of anything automated. The Zabbix developers won't know how any particular site may have altered a stock template, so automated processes that try to upgrade templates are likely to do the wrong thing for some customers and cause a mess.

I think one area where the developers could improve the product is if they

• versioned and checksummed templates somehow
• if your existing template matches an expected checksum, then they can assume that you haven't modified the template in any way, so then they could replace (without confirmation) the older template with the newer one on import/upgrade.
• longer term, some kind of a "template merge" screen would be nice. Something that allows you to compare old versus new and perhaps apply any customization from your old template to the new one. I think the logic for something like that would be very difficult to get right, though, and there's lots of other places where developer time is probably better spent.

Right now, I think your best bet is to just manually compare old template vs new, and adjust your existing template to incorporate updates and changes from the later template. If you don't like doing that graphically, then a template export to something like JSON and text comparison tools might make it easier to spot differences, though I suspect there will be too many other differences to make this very useful when comparing a template from version 4 to something recent.

One other thing I would recommend: if you use the built in templates but you want to modify them, don't modify the stock copy: clone the template to a new name that makes it clear that the template is a locally-modified copy, then modify the clone. That makes it easier to just delete the stock copy of a template and re-import the latest and greatest templates. You still have to see where the new template differs from your modified clone, but the import is less complicated.

Good luck! If you find something that works well (or even passably) for your situation, please do post with what you did. I'm sure it will be helpful to others that face the same challenges.

[NoOneIsPerfect]

Thank you for your suggestions. Having widescreen monitor really helps doing this manual item by item, trigger by trigger move. Some objects can be copied, others like discovery governed items can only be manually recreated.