Zabbix LLC has just released the latest version of its software, version 6.4. Let's check out what new features this version introduces and how Zabbix has evolved compared to the previous edition.

If you're interested in IT infrastructure monitoring, check out our latest article. We wrote about monitoring modern IT environments using Zabbix.

A brief overview of Zabbix 6.4

The new release focuses on improving Zabbix configuration, enabling instant propagation of configuration changes in large, distributed environments, and simplifying update procedures. Organizations using LDAP or SAML will benefit from new Just-in-Time (JIT) features, allowing IT administrators to map LDAP groups to Zabbix groups. This enables delegating user management to Active Directory.

The new version also includes various templates and integrations for Veeam, AWS, Azure, Cisco, and many others.

Key changes in Zabbix 6.4

Delegating user management to Active Directory
 

With new Just-in-Time (JIT) features, Zabbix users can be authenticated using existing LDAP/SAML authentication mechanisms. By mapping LDAP groups to Zabbix groups, users can be automatically created upon first login. This allows organizations to centralize their user management and provide appropriate permissions, roles, and alert channels in Zabbix.

Marking alerts as cause or symptom

Zabbix 6.4 introduces the ability to group alerts to improve fault analysis. Grouping involves marking alerts as symptoms and linking them to a root cause alert. This leads to quick understanding and resolution of issues while reducing the information overload that can be generated by large numbers of events during a critical system failure.

Instant propagation of configuration changes across the Zabbix infrastructure

The ability to instantly propagate configuration changes across hundreds of data centers is crucial for large, distributed organizations. With changes in configuration management design, Zabbix 6.4 not only enables immediate propagation of any configurations to Zabbix agents and proxies but also ensures minimal impact on performance during this process.

Zero-downtime Zabbix upgrades

In newer versions of the Zabbix server, significant improvements have been made to the behavior of Zabbix proxies. These changes aim to facilitate seamless upgrades of Zabbix between major versions. Starting from Zabbix 6.4, the Zabbix server supports data collection from proxies no older than the previous long-term support (LTS) release. This is particularly beneficial for large, distributed organizations with dozens or hundreds of proxies monitoring critical infrastructure.

Collecting thousands of SNMP metrics in bulk mode

New methods of collecting and discovering SNMP metrics in bulk mode allow Zabbix administrators to collect thousands of SNMP metrics at once. The new approach to collecting SNMP metrics is up to 20 times faster compared to regular SNMP polling and significantly reduces the performance impact on the SNMP device.

Forwarding alerts and metrics via HTTP to external systems

Zabbix 6.4 can be used as an information source for other applications, analytical reports, and AI engines by transmitting metrics and events in real-time via HTTP. Metrics and events can be sent to message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Amazon Kinesis to adjust the behavior of external systems in real-time.

Tracking template versions and providers

To help Zabbix users update their templates, Zabbix 6.4 introduces template versioning. This can be used not only to track official templates but also to improve the CI/CD process and automatically update templates using the Zabbix API. Custom community templates can also be tagged with version and provider attributes.

Creating Zabbix widgets

As the Zabbix developer community grows, it was essential for Zabbix to focus on providing support and guidelines to streamline access to the software. For this purpose, the ability to create Zabbix widgets has been introduced. Additionally, Zabbix 6.4 features a new Developer Center section in the documentation. This section contains information, guidelines, and code examples that help the Zabbix community extend the tool with their own plugins, modules, and widgets.

Other improvements

The release also brings many other significant enhancements, such as various visualization changes, performance improvements related to problem detection and data processing, numerous user interface changes, new elements, and much more.

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