Zabbix 6.4 - Zero-downtime upgrades to the latest release and JIT user provisioning

The new release focuses on streamlining Zabbix configuration by enabling Zabbix to instantly propagate configuration changes across large, distributed environments, as well as simplifying Zabbix upgrade workflows. Organizations utilizing LDAP or SAML will benefit from the new Just-in-time (JIT) user provisioning features, enabling IT administrators to propagate Zabbix users by utilizing centralized user authentication mechanisms. This update also contains various templates and integrations for the most popular vendors and cloud providers, such as Veeam, AWS, Azure, Cisco, and many others.

Zabbix 6.4 enables a variety of new scenarios across different use-cases:

Enterprise user provisioning with LDAP/SAML

With the new JIT user provisioning features, Zabbix user can be provisioned and authenticated by utilizing the existing enterprise LDAP/SAML authentication mechanism. This enables organizations to centrally manage their users and provision them with the corresponding Zabbix permissions, roles and alerting channels.

Distinguishing cause and symptom events

Zabbix 6.4 introduces the concept of problem rankings. Problems can be ranked as cause or symptom events, with a cause event having corresponding symptoms. This allows for implementation of a sophisticated root cause filtering and alerting logic, which can be used to not only quickly understand and resolve the root cause issues, but also to reduce noise which can be generated by a large number of symptom events, in case of a critical system outage.

Instant propagation of configuration changes across the whole Zabbix infrastructure

Having the ability to instantly propagate any configuration changes across hundreds of data centers is vital for large, distributed organizations. With configuration management design changes, Zabbix 6.4 not only enables instant propagation of any and all configuration across Zabbix agents and proxies, but also ensures the minimum possible performance impact while doing so.

Zero-downtime Zabbix upgrade

Major improvements have been made to Zabbix proxy behavior with newer Zabbix server versions. The changes were implemented with the goal to facilitate seamless Zabbix upgrade procedure between major releases. Starting from Zabbix 6.4, Zabbix server will support data collection from proxies no older than the previous LTS release. This especially benefits large, distributed organizations, with tens or hundreds of proxies monitoring mission critical infrastructures.

Collect thousands of SNMP metrics in bulk

The new SNMP bulk metric collection and discovery methods allows Zabbix administrators to collect thousands of SNMP metrics with a single bulk request. The new SNMP metric collection approach is up to 20x as fast when compared to regular SNMP polling and vastly reduces the performance impact on the SNMP target device.

Integrate Zabbix with data pipelines by streaming metrics and events over HTTP

Zabbix 6.4 can be used as a source of information for other applications, analytics reports and AI engines by streaming metrics and events over HTTP in real time. Metrics and events can be streamed to message brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Amazon Kinesis to adapt the behavior of external systems in real time.

Track template versions and vendors

To help Zabbix users keep their templates up to date, Zabbix 6.4 introduces template versioning. Template versioning can be used to not only track your official templates, but also to streamline your CI/CD pipeline and automatically keep your templates up to date with Zabbix API. Custom community templates can also be marked with a version and vendor attributes.

Development framework for Zabbix widget creation

With a growing community of Zabbix developers, it was important for Zabbix to focus on providing support, guidelines and tutorials to make the process of extending Zabbix as streamlined as possible. To achieve this, a new development framework for Zabbix widget creation has been introduced. In addition, Zabbix 6.4 introduces a new Developer Center documentation section has been introduced. The section contains tutorials, guidelines and code examples with the goal to help the Zabbix community extend the tool with their own custom plugins, modules and widgets.

Other improvements

The release also adds many other major improvements, such as multiple visualization changes, performance improvements related to problem detection and data preprocessing, multiple UI/UX changes, new items, and much more.

Availability

Zabbix 6.4 is now available for download: www.zabbix.com/download

Discover what's new in Zabbix 6.4: www.zabbix.com/whats_new_6_4

Explore Zabbix 6.4.0 documentation section: www.zabbix.com/documentation/6.4/en/manual/introduction/whatsnew640

See the full list in the release notes: www.zabbix.com/rn/rn6.4.0

About Zabbix

Zabbix team's mission is to make a universal monitoring solution available and affordable for all. Zabbix LLC develops open-source software for monitoring the whole IT stack in infrastructures of any size - both on-premises and in the cloud. Apart from that, the company offers a wide range of professional services designed to fit every customer's unique business demand, including implementation, integration, custom development, and consulting services, as well as various training programs. The first Zabbix version was released in 2001. Zabbix LLC was established in 2005 with the aim to provide expert technical support services. Zabbix user base includes governmental institutions of different countries along with some of the world's biggest telco, finance, educational, retail, and healthcare companies. Many of them are included in the Fortune 500 list.