Zabbix 4.2 release packed with modern monitoring system for data collection, processing and visualization

Zabbix Team announced the release of Zabbix 4.2. The latest release of Zabbix is packed with modern monitoring system for: data collection and processing, distributed monitoring, real-time problem and anomaly detection, alerting and escalations, visualization and more.

Let us check out what Zabbix 4.2 has actually brought to the table. Here is a list of the most important functionality included into the new release.

Official support of new platforms

In addition to existing official packages and appliances, Zabbix 4.2 will now cater to the following platforms:

Zabbix package for RaspberryPi

Zabbix package for SUSE Enterprise Linux Server

Zabbix agent for Mac OS/X

Zabbix agent for MSI for Windows

Zabbix Docker images

Built-in support of Prometheus data collection

Zabbix is able to collect data in many different ways (push/pull) from various data sources including JMX, SNMP, WMI, HTTP/HTTPS, RestAPI, XML Soap, SSH, Telnet, agents, scripts and other data sources, with Prometheus being the latest addition to the bunch.

Now the 4.2 release will offer an integration with the exporters using native support of PromQL language. Moreover, the use of dependent metrics will give the Zabbix team ability to collect massive amounts of Prometheus metrics in a highly efficient way: this way they get all the data using a single HTTP call and then just reuse it for corresponding dependent metrics.

Zabbix can also transform Prometheus data into JSON format, which can be used directly for low-level discovery.

Efficient high-frequency monitoring

We all want to discover problems as fast as possible. Now with 4.2 we can collect data with high frequency, instantly discover problems without keeping excessive amount of history data in the Zabbix database.

Validation of collected data and error handling

No one wants to collect incorrect data. With Zabbix 4.2 we can address that via built-in preprocessing rules that validate data by matching or not matching regular expression, using JSONPath or XMLPath.

Now it is also possible to extract error messages from collected data. This can be especially handy if we get an error from external APIs.

Preprocessing data with JavaScript

In Zabbix 4.2 you can fully harness the power of user-defined scripts written in JavaScript. Support of JavaScript gives absolute freedom of data preprocessing! In fact, you can now replace all external scripts with JavaScript.

This will enable all sorts of data transformation, aggregation, filtering, arithmetical and logical operations and much more.

Test preprocessing rules from UI

As preprocessing becomes much more powerful, it is important to have a tool to verify complex scenarios. Zabbix 4.2 will allow to test preprocessing rules straight from the Web UI!

Processing millions of metrics per second!

Prior to 4.2, all preprocessing was handled solely by the Zabbix server. A combination of proxy-based preprocessing with throttling gives us the ability to perform high-frequency monitoring collecting millions of values per second without overloading the Zabbix Server. Proxies will perform massive preprocessing of collected data while the Server will only receive a small fraction of it.

Easy low level discovery

Low-level discovery (LLD) is a very effective tool for automatic discovery of all sorts of resources (filesystems, processes, applications, services, etc) and automatic creation of metrics, triggers and graphs related to them. It tremendously helps to save time and effort allowing to use just a single template for monitoring devices with different resources.

Zabbix 4.2 supports processing based on arbitrary JSON input, which in turn allows us to communicate directly with external APIs, and use received data for automatic creation of hosts, metrics and triggers.

Combined with JavaScript preprocessing it opens up fantastic opportunities for templates, that may work with various external data sources such as cloud APIs, application APIs, data in XML, JSON or any other format.

Support of TimescaleDB

TimescaleDB promises better performance due to more efficient algorithms and performance oriented data structures. Another significant advantage of TimescaleDB is automatic table partitioning, which improves performance and (combined with Zabbix) delivers fully automatic management of historical data.

However, Zabbix team hasn’t performed any serious benchmarking yet. So it is hard to comment on real life experience of running TimescaleDB in production. At this moment TimescaleDB is an actively developed and rather young project.

Simplified tag management

Prior to Zabbix 4.2 we could only set tags for individual triggers. Now tag management is much more efficient thanks to template and host tags support. All detected problems get tag information not only from the trigger, but also from the host and corresponding templates.

More flexible auto-registration

Zabbix 4.2 auto-registration options gives the ability to filter host names based on a regular expression. It’s really useful if we want to create different auto-registration scenarios for various sets of hosts. Matching by regular expression is especially beneficial in case we have complex naming conventions for our devices.

Control host names for auto-discovery

Another improvement is related to naming hosts during auto-discovery. Zabbix 4.2 allows to assign received metric data to a host name and visible name. It is an extremely useful feature that enables great level of automation for network discovery, especially if we use Zabbix or SNMP agents.

Test media type from Web UI

Zabbix 4.2 allows us to send a test message or check that our chosen alerting method works as expected straight from the Zabbix frontend. This is quite useful for checking the scripts we are using for integration with external alerting and helpdesk systems etc.

Remote monitoring of Zabbix components

Zabbix 4.2 introduces remote monitoring of internal performance and availability metrics of the Zabbix Server and Proxy. Not only that, it also allows to discover Zabbix related issues and alert us even if the components are overloaded or, for example, have a large amount of data stored in local buffer (in case of proxies).

Nicely formatted email messages

Zabbix 4.2 comes with support of HTML format in email messages. It means that we are not limited to plain text anymore, the messages can use all power of HTML and CSS for much nicer and easy to read alert messages.

Accessing remote services from network maps

A new set of macros is now supported in network maps for creation of user-defined URLs pointing to external systems. It allows to open external tickets in helpdesk or configuration management systems, or do any other actions using just one or two mouse-clicks.

LLD rule as a dependant metric

This functionality allows to use received values of a master metric for data collection and LLD rules simultaneously. In case of data collection from Prometheus exporters, Zabbix will only execute HTTP query once and the result of the query will be used immediately for all dependent metrics (LLD rules and metric values).

Animations for maps

Zabbix 4.2 comes with support of animated GIFs making problems on maps more noticeable.

Extracting data from HTTP headers

Web-monitoring brings the ability to extract data from HTTP headers. With this we can now create multi-step scenarios for Web-monitoring and for external APIs using the authentication token received in one of the steps.