What's New in Zabbix 5.0 LTS

You choose: deploy on-premise or in the cloud

Zabbix is a Free and Open Source monitoring solution that can be deployed everywhere depending on your needs!

In addition to existing official packages and appliances, Zabbix 5.0 now also caters to the following platforms: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, Debian 10, Ubuntu 20.04, Raspbian 10, Mac OS/X, RHEL 8, CentOS 8, MSI for Windows Agent.

See all available platforms in Downloads

Zabbix introduces a new set of out-of-the-box integrations with industry-standard cloud providers:

SAML authentication for single sign-on

SAML is used to provide a single point of authentication at a secure identity provider, meaning that user credentials never leave the firewall boundary, and then SAML is used to assert the identity to Zabbix and other applications. Support of SAML allows to have out-of-the-box integration of Zabbix with various on-premise and cloud identity providers like Microsoft ADFS, OpenAM, SecurAuth, Okta, Auth0 and many others.

Secure and reliable monitoring

Zabbix 5.0 introduces significant improvements for much more secure monitoring:

Support of HTTP Proxy for webhooks that allows to make connections from Zabbix Server to external alerting and ITSM systems more secure and controlled
Support of blacklists and whitelists for metrics on agent-side
Configurable ciphers for all Zabbix components to avoid using of non-secure ciphers for TLS connections
Support of encrypted connections to MySQL and PostgreSQL backends
Strong SHA256 for keeping hashes of user passwords

Keep your secrets secure

Zabbix 5.0 supports secret user macros for keeping any sensitive information like passwords and API tokens that you do not want to be exposed to end-users.

Scalability and performance

Zabbix 5.0 supports optional compression of collected data for TimescaleDB. In addition to general TimescaleDB advantages (automatic partitioning, performance and scalability) it also helps to even more improve performance and lower storage costs.

Zabbix UI is also improved to support monitoring and management of millions of monitored devices.

Next generation Zabbix Agent got official support

The new agent offers a wide range of new capabilities and advanced monitoring functions for Linux and Windows:

Written in Golang
Plugin framework for monitoring of various services and applications
Ability to maintain state between checks (for example, keeping persistent DB connections)
Support of trapping
Built-in scheduler to support flexible time intervals
Efficient network usage through bulk data transfer
Support of persistent storage of collected data
Drop-in replacement of existing agents on Linux and Windows

For a complete list of new features check out the Documentation.

NB! Existing Zabbix agent will still be supported.

Download

Next generation Zabbix Agent got official support

Monitoring that is easy to use and manage

Zabbix 5.0 got tons of usability and automation improvements that help:

New layout of Zabbix UI optimized for wide screens
Threading for email notifications generated by the same event
New preprocessing operation Replace, new operator for JSONPath
Ability to unacknowledge event
Support of message templates for media types for straight forward configuration of notifications
CLI tool to test JavaScript-based preprocessing and webhooks
Ability to test new and existing metrics from UI
Support of mass update of user macros
SNMP settings moved to host interface level for more simple templates and easier management
Host and metric availability monitoring using function nodata() respects availability of proxies

Monitoring that is easy to use and manage

Flexibility to monitor anything you want

Zabbix 5.0 extended functionality to make it more flexible:

Triggers support operations with text data
Support of host macros for host prototypes
Support of Float64 datatype
Support of override for low level discovery (LLD) helps to create much smarter templates

Flexibility to monitor anything you want

Automation and discovery

Automation is an essential part of Zabbix. Zabbix 5.0 brings it forward with support of:

Discovery of Windows performance counters
Discovery of JMX counters
Better ODBC monitoring with ability to configure all options for each metric individually

Advanced visualization

Presenting data in a human readable way is critical for operations. Zabbix 5.0 helps to make it even better by introducing:

A new view (Monitoring->Hosts) for displaying a list of monitored devices with advanced filtering options
Support of filtering by event tags for some dashboard widgets
Ability to copy dashboard graphs as pictures
Support of UI modules to extend functionality of Zabbix
Faster creation of dashboards thanks to ability to copy widgets
Improved consistency of map labels

Built-in integrations with ITSM systems

Zabbix 5.0 introduces a new set of out-of-the-box integrations with industry-standard cloud-based and on-premise ITSM systems.

Official webhook Coding Guideline was introduced to set standard and simplify creation of webhook based integrations.

zabbix.com/documentation/guidelines/webhooks

More integrations with ITSM systems: Integrations

Built-in integrations with alerting systems

Zabbix 5.0 introduces a new set of out-of-the-box integrations with industry-standard alerting and notification systems.

More integrations with alerting systems: Integrations

New and updated templates and plugins

Most of the existing templates are updated and new templates and plugins are introduced for monitoring of different services, applications and devices.

Most of the templates now take advantage of the functionality for smart automatic discovery of various resources.

More templates and plugins: Integrations

Adjust Zabbix to your needs, contribute!

Make your template, plugin or a webhook included into the official Zabbix distribution by following these three steps:

Sign Zabbix Contributor Agreement (ZCA)
zabbix.com/developers
Make Zabbix Pull Request
https://git.zabbix.com
Zabbix Dev Team will review and accept if everything is fine

Congratulations! Your solution is officially supported and thousands of Zabbix users are thankful for your effort!

Adjust Zabbix to your needs, contribute!

More newly developed and improved features of Zabbix 5.0 LTS

Increased size of acknowledge messages from 255 to 4096 characters
Added support of LIBSSH to support newer platforms like RHEL 8
Support of Elasticsearch 7.x (7.4, 7.6)
Latest data displays data if filter is not set
Increased zabbix_sender time resolution to nanoseconds
Base64 processing in JavaScript using new functions atob() and btoa()
Do not log system.run[] for local use
Increased size of item key from 255 to 2048 characters

Ability to flush SNMP cache, SNMPv3 context changes
Faster hash function for internal operations
Documented how to do filtering for vmware.event monitoring
Improved consistency of map labels
Filter by individual severities for Monitoring→Problems
Ability to use user macros for IPMI user name and password
Remote monitoring of versions of Zabbix components
Added filter for discovery rules
New API method to get auditlog

Removed legacy to build a better product faster

No support of Internet Explorer 11
Dropped support of IBM DB2
mbedTLS (former polarSSL) is no longer supported for encryption. Only OpenSSL and GnuTSL libraries
Minimum supported version for PHP is now 7.2: safer and more strict code

And more! For a complete list of new features check out the Release notes. Release Notes.

Discover Zabbix 5.0 LTS now!

Expanded information and the complete list of Zabbix 5.0 LTS developments, improvements and new functionality is available in Zabbix Manual.

Want to upgrade from older Zabbix versions to Zabbix 5.0 LTS? Follow our detailed step-by-step Upgrade procedure or Contact us for further professional Upgrade Service by Zabbix experts.

If you have any other questions on Zabbix 5.0 LTS, please feel free to join our free live Webinars. During the session you will be provided with all the important information on Zabbix latest release and have a chance to ask your questions directly to Zabbix specialists.