Looking for recommendations for migrating and upgrading services.

[ZabTheo]

Hello,

We are migrating servers from CentOS to RHEL. Each of our datacentres has their own instance of Zabbix to monitor the servers within that environment. We would like utilise proxies to have a single pane of glass for all monitoring rather then logging in to two separate Zabbix instances.

We are running Zabbix 5.0 and would take this opportunity to upgrade to 6.4 at the same time. We aren't too concerned about retaining historic data in Zabbix.

I have thought of two methods to approach this.
1. Upgrade Zabbix to 6.4. Spin up the new servers. Migrate the services to the new servers.
OR
2. Spin up the new servers. Install fresh Zabbix instances. Change zabbix configs to point to the new servers and lose historic data.

Based on what we are trying to archive (Migrate to new server OS, upgrade Zabbix to 6.4, and have a single instance for all servers in the environment), are there any recommendations or best practices someone can point me to.

Many thanks.

[cyber]

If you really-really want single instance, then there is no point on going for nr. 1...
Build new env side-by-side, add proxies etc.. then migrate your hosts to new instance, by pointing them to new proxies (for example together with agent upgrade and new config). Can be done gradually, based on whatever internal rules you may have, by provided services or whatever... For a while you will have 3 instances to look after.. Keeping data from both old instances would be a trouble, as there are definitely hosts/items/triggers with same ID-s. So you most probably start from scratch here. And in such case you need to decide where you will put your main new instance and how you connect your other DC(-s). What happens if one DC is gone? What happens, if that is the main one? Are you able to build a HA that can run from either of DC-s? GSLB? Data sync between DC-s? Load of questions..

Or if having 2 separate instances still works for you, you can go with nr1 and wait until 7.2 (maybe) implements this one:

• One dashboard for multiple data sources
  Ability to display data from multiple Zabbix servers on a single dashboard to enable multi-DC monitoring scenario

It would be a nice feature, but It really needs a clarification, is there anything else but the idea... Building something with the hope to get a feature and then not getting it, would be and issue....