12 November 2013
Zabbix SIA is pleased to announce the availability of Zabbix 2.2.0, next major release.
Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution. Zabbix is released under the GPL, thus it is free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial use. A complete text of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.txt.
This document contains the release notes for Zabbix 2.2.0. Download it from http://www.zabbix.com/download.php.
This release introduces more than 100 of new features and improvements.
Upgrade notes
Please read Zabbix 2.2.0 upgrade notes and upgrade procedure for migration details.
The following sections describe the release in details and provide late-breaking or other information that supplements its main documentation.
Overall system performance was significantly improved thanks to introduction of value cache for faster trigger processing. Also data sender process and housekeeper were optimized to run faster. Increased performance of operations related to historical and configuration caches. Added support of parallel processing of time-based functions by Zabbix server.
Also number of update operations was greatly decreased when processing new data. It leads to massive performance improvement for data collection and processing as well as better responsiveness of the interface.
Added support of monitoring of VMWare virtualization platforms including auto-discovery of VMs, monitoring of performance and availability of both VMs and hypervisors as well as nice handling of migration of virtual machines.
Added support of loadable modules for extending Zabbix agent checks, also server and proxy agentless checks.
Unknown events are no longer generated and supported. New triggers will now be created in OK state.
Application inheritance logic was changed to allow linking multiple templates with the same applications.
Internal events were introduced to allow actions and notifications in case of unknown triggers or not supported items.
Zabbix will automatically update database structure when upgrading to newer major version of Zabbix.
Housekeeper supports fine grained control on what history tables should be processes and how.
Implemented support of user macros in global scripts, script confirmation text, trigger comments and allowed hosts for trapper items. Complex macros like {host:key.last/min/avg/max()} supported in graph titles. Implemented new notification macros: {ITEM.STATE<1-9>}, {LLDRULE.ID}, {LLDRULE.NAME}, {LLDRULE.DESCRIPTION}, {LLDRULE.KEY}, {LLDRULE.STATE} and {TRIGGER.STATE}.
Added support of LLD macros in trigger prototype expressions, descriptions as well as in item prototypes. Added support of new notification macros: {TRIGGER.NAME.ORIG}, {ITEM.NAME.ORIG}, {ITEM.KEY.ORIG}. Updated macros {ACTION.*} and {EVENT.RECOVERY.*}; {EVENT.*} to return information of the event which triggered an action.
Permission logic was changed so that read permission does not override write permission anymore.
Zabbix may contain up-to 2^64-1 of different types of objects (items, triggers, events, etc) in non-DM setup.
Added support of host prototypes for low level discovery.
Zabbix API was fully documented with changelog and detailed description for all objects and methods.
Methods proxy.delete, user.delete and host.delete were changed to accept both objects and IDs. Implemented property array support for all get methods. Implemented map.get selectUrls parameter and itemprototype.get selectDiscoveryRule parameter. Dropped support of output shorten for the API get methods. Dropped the event value_changed property.
Added support for content retrieval based on regular expressions, configurable number of retries per web scenario, web monitoring using HTTP proxy and support of templated web scenarios.
Added support of internal items for monitoring health of proxies.
Windows agent was enhanced to support native WMI requests.
Added context name support, SHA authentication protocol and AES privacy protocol for SNMPv3 checks. Also added support of multiple dynamic SNMP indexes.
Added support of IPMI discrete sensors.
Regular expressions and maintenance periods form form were redesigned. Implemented multiselect in dashboard configuration, Action -> Conditions and Operations, Script, Item filter and host and host group related pages. Redesigned Host -> Templates form and added multiselect. Improved multiselect, added possibility to ignore elements. Implemented discovery rule check editing. Added possibility to add new elements in multiselect, added multiselect in hosts mass update and in items mass update form, and fixed regressions in application.massadd and in application filter. Other usability improvements.
Implemented minimum trigger severity filter in maps.
Added support of anti-aliasing for graphs and map connectors.
Added support of value mapping for character data.
Added filtering by application in Monitoring -> Overview and Data/Triggers overview screen elements.
Added support of proc.num, net.if.in, net.if.out, net.if.total for HP-UX, system.swap.size for AIX, net.if.discovery for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD; added printing Aliases and PerfCounters when agent is run with -p option. Added whitespace trimming for server lists in agent conf file and allowed hosts for trapper items. Added used swap size support for Windows and OSF. Added support of Windows eventlog source regex filter.
Increased length to 2048 characters of expression field for triggers.
WEB scenarios can be templated.
Added support for optional host metadata to active agent for auto-registration.
Added support of PHP 5.5 that introduced new API for work with MySQL.
Allowed access to historical data for disabled hosts.
Implemented user name and surname displaying in acknowledgements.
Changed network discovery to take in account proxies when identifying discovered hosts.
Added support of tree-like structure in the host menu for user scripts.
Host and item details are available in Monitoring->Inventory and Monitoring->Latest data sections of Zabbix WEB interface.
Added support of Windows Eventing for event log collection from all Windows platforms.
Added Zabbix sender dynamic link library (DLL) for trouble-free integration of Zabbix monitoring with your own applications under Windows platforms.
Zabbix sender exit status now better reflects the operation result - success:0, partial success:2, failure:1.
Added dynamic display of process current activity and statistics in "ps" and "top".
Added zfs to the default list of filesystems discovered by LLD based templates. Added logging of used configuration file name for all Zabbix daemons. Added support of AllowRoot by server and proxy daemons.
See Zabbix Manual for full details.
Recompile Zabbix binaries and update front-end PHP files. Database structure will be automatically updated by Zabbix Server when migrating from 2.0.x. See Zabbix Manual for a detailed upgrade procedure.
Zabbix Server has been tested on the following platforms:
- Ubuntu Linux, AMD64, kernel 2.6.11, MySQL 5.x
- Ubuntu Linux, Intel, kernel 2.6.15, MySQL 5.0.22, PostgreSQL 8.3
- RedHat EL 5.3, Intel, kernel 2.6.18, Oracle 11gR2
- Slackware Linux, x86, kernel 2.6.29.6, MySQL 5.1.x
Zabbix Agents have been compiled and tested on the following platforms:
- AIX 5.2
- FreeBSD 4.x, 5.x, 6.x
- HP-UX 10.x, 11.x
- Linux 2.4.x, 2.6.x
- Linux CentOS
- NetBSD 2.0
- OS/X 10.2
- Solaris 8, 9, 10
- Tru64 5.1B
- Windows XP, 2000, 2003, 2008, Vista
Note that agents are available pre-compiled from http://www.zabbix.com/download.php for a limited number of versions and platforms.
Zabbix Company provides a full range of professional services. We also provide trouble-free upgrade service for easy migration from earlier versions to Zabbix 2.2.x. Please contact Sales for pricing and more details.
- Zabbix 2.2 Manual
- Zabbix Forums (http://www.zabbix.com/forum)
- Zabbix Support (http://www.zabbix.com/support.php)