Zabbix Roadmap

Zabbix 4.2

ETA: March, 2019

• Infrastructure

  • Migration to Git
    Finally we can talk same language to devs around.
  • Community and partners to review proposals
    Design documents for all dev work will be shared with Zabbix users and community. Everyone will have a change to review it and come up with useful suggestions.
  • Official builds for new platforms
    ZBXNEXT-4013, 2473, 3047, 1348, 2378 Official builds for Docker, SuSE, Mac OS/X, Windows (with encryption support, MSI), Raspbian and other as well as images for cloud platforms will be provided.
• Better workflow

  • Guidelines for template creators
    A comprehensive guide having recommendations and best practices for template creators will be created and supported by Zabbix. Let’s make all templates high quality and consistent!
  • Versioning for templates
    That is probably most important functionality planned in Zabbix 4.2. It will enable clear workflow for template management, it will also simplify daily maintenance of Zabbix systems very much.
• Data collection

  • ZBXNEXT-4724 Validation and throttling rules for preprocessing
    Zabbix will be able to validate incoming data to avoid processing of incorrect or out-of-range values. Throttling will enable to skip repetitive values without sacrificing real-time problem detection.
  • ZBXNEXT-4724 Discarding values and setting custom errors in preprocessing
    It is related to validation of data and ability to set and even extract custom error messages based on received data.
  • ZBXNEXT-3508 Embedded language for extending preprocessing
    Power users require power tools. That will enable creation of any preprocessing using a full featured scripting languages like Lua, Python or JavaScript.
  • ZBXNEXT-4087 Preprocessing for LLD rules including support of JSON
    Preprocessing will be extended to accept data in arbitrary JSON format. No need to prepare JSON in special format anymore.
  • Out of the box support of Prometheus exporters
    It is already possible to extract data from arbitrary data sources using regular expressions, which is not always easy to configure. This functionality is about native support of high-performance data collection from Prometheus exporters.
• Extreme flexibility

  • New syntax for trigger expressions
    ZBXNEXT-35, 3441, 3446 It would enable unlimited capabilities for problem detection and aggregation.
  • ZBXNEXT-4731 Host and template level tags
    In addition to trigger tags, host and template tags will be introduced. It will be much easier to manage and maintain tags!
  • Plugin system for dashboard widgets
    Zabbix will provide a well-defined and documented framework for developing your own dashboard widgets.
  • ZBXNEXT-1096 Timeout on item level
    Global timeout will be replaced with per metric timeout settings.
• Ease of use

  • ZBXNEXT-1238, 97 Test actions and media types from UI
    Finally, it will be possible to test actions and media types straight from the UI, hooray!
  • Test item preprocessing from UI
    As preprocessing become more advanced, ability to test it from Web interface becomes crucial.
  • Merge calculated and aggregated items
    ZBXNEXT-292, 1521, 1829, 1911, 2463, 3441, 3444, 3904 Aggregated and calculated items are very close by their nature, so this step is quite logical.
  • Replace screens with dashboards
    It is time to merge functionality of screens with dashboards and make the cool.
  • Multiple filters for Monitoring->Problems
    It is about support of multiple filters and ability to switch from one filter to another with just one click.
• Plugins

  • Webhooks for actions
    Great for integration with 3rd party notification channels.
  • Webhooks on problem generation
    It will enable ability to consult other systems (topology, configuration management, etc) on problem generation so that Zabbix may use received information to assign new tags to a newly generated problem.
  • ZBXNEXT-3496 Ability to extend context and top level menus
    Another way of extending Zabbix UI and context menus without touching Zabbix code.
• Discovery

  • ZBXNEXT-158 Use received data for hostname
    Zabbix network discovery will be able to use received value as a host name, nice!
• Event processing

  • ZBXNEXT-46, 1891, Host and proxy level dependencies
    It says it all.
• Security and integrity

  • ZBX-2815 API audit records for all operations
    All API operations will be reflected in the audit records with easy access.
• Scalability, Redundancy, HA and DM

  • List of use cases
  • Research on possible solutions
    We should agree on practical use cases and come up with a good solution that will be implemented in Zabbix 4.4 and 5.0.
• Minor improvements

  • Various improvements
    Other minor enhancements and improvements.

Zabbix 4.4

ETA: September, 2019

Zabbix 5.0 LTS

ETA: March, 2020